When you think of filters, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Most probably things such as company size, demographics, industry, revenue, and job title.
But did you know that there are many, many more different types of filters out there that you can use to find your ideal target accounts?
Adding in some of these new filters and trying them out can bring your A-game by having a super-defined list of target accounts.
Let’s jump in.
What filters should you use if you are searching for companies?
Before we begin, here is just a small word of advice: You know it’s a good filter to apply when most of your paying customers also belong to that filter. This can help you find more look-a-like filters to find your best-fit accounts.
NOTE:
This article is structured by categories, and the filters you can use to search for target accounts are listed underneath.
People
The category of filter that you could first make use of is the “people” category.
This includes filters such as:
A.)Company size
B.)Department size
C.)Job title.
For example, we once targeted companies with a minimum of 5 people in the sales team, which also contained the Sales director.
You could use Linkedin Sales Navigator for this, but be sure to add some additional keywords to refine your search.
Once you have a list of people you would like to target within companies, add personalization when messaging them through Linkedin for greater response rates.
Money
Within the money category, you could target things such as:
A.) Revenue (or even tam).
Just note that money is not always an exact filter unless you are going after public trade. Otherwise, in most cases, it is just an estimate.
Think about it… How would Zoominfo know the exact annual revenue of a small SaaS business, for example? They estimate the revenue by market size and market share.
B.) Funding
Within the funding filter, you can sort by:
i.) Funding date (Ensure that the funding has taken place within the past 30 days.)
ii)Funding amount (You could search for target accounts that spent a specific amount on funding.)
iii) Filter by funding round. (A,B,C)
iiii) Investor
You could also look at the investor behind funding, but in most cases, this would be getting super granular for your specific account selection, and there aren’t many sales reps who do this. BUT it is a possibility if need be.
Time
When it comes to the time category, you can use:
A.) The year that the company was founded.
“Time” can show you that the company has a real product and that it has been around for some time. This is especially important if you would like to target businesses that have been established for several years and not just a new startup.
You could look for bootstrap startups that have been in business for two years even if they have not raised money, for example. And even if it’s a solo founder, you know that they are probably working with a product that has “legs.”
But make sure that when you are filtering via “time,” it is an actual “real-time” situation. For example, some people might say that they are a founder of a side hustle for seven years, but the business has actually never grown.
Therefore before adding these prospects into your sales cycle, double-check that they are legit.
Intent Data
Intent data is a product you can use to find companies looking for your specific service or product. It will crawl through a bunch of traffic, opt-ins, cookies and tell you which companies are looking for what service or product.
Suppose you are in a vast market offering a widespread service or product, for example, a marketing agency. In that case, you can buy intent data to find companies that are looking for marketers.
Intent data is great if you are in a very large space where there is high competition, but if you are in a specialized niche space, then buying intent data is not necessary.
(Salesforce uses intent data to build a targeted list.)
Hiring
A.) Title
When it comes to using “hiring” as a category, you would filter by job title to find the right person to contact.
Note:
You might be wondering if “hiring” is a good category.
The answer?
In short… Yes, but with a caveat.
Be aware that if you are selling an outsource solution to someone who is looking to in-house something, there will be a big hurdle that you will have to cross.
Unless it’s a total no-brainer and outsourcing is a better option for your sales activities than creating an in-house team, for example.
A good role of thumb is to check if any of your paying existing customers switched over to you when they were previously considering hiring someone for an inhouse-role.
Events
Thankfully we are past the days of complete lockdowns; in-person events might still take place. But due to technological advances, events don’t have to be in the flesh necessarily.
Use these filters when taking a look at the events category:
A.) Those who attended a conference
You could pay the right person to get a list of all the people who were at a specific event and have your team contact each person on that list.
Here is an example of what you could say:
“Hey, we were both at x. We didn’t get a chance to cross paths….etc,”
Or
“It was great to meet you. Etc …” and then in the email, you could then add your ABM strategy to find some new prospects.
Most of the time, events bring in quite a few significant leads and a high response rate because it is a really relevant list.
B.) Webinars and even trade shows can all be a great way to find high-value prospects.
Social Signals
- Facebook Likes / Social media likes
Social signals are a great way to make a new list of accounts. A nifty trick that some email marketers use is to look at how many Facebook likes a company has, which usually gives them an estimate of how many email subscribers a company has.
There is usually a very close coloration between the number of likes a company page has and how many email subscribers they have. This data can also be scraped, which makes collecting the data simpler.
For example, if Quickmail.io has 100 000 likes on their Facebook page, we could guess that they will have an email list of 100 000 people.
This could work for pretty much all social media platforms. Another example would be if you wanted to sell Ad Banners to Youtubers. You would first want to see how many subscribers a particular channel has before targeting the decision-maker.
Marketing Activity
A.)Keyword Advertising / PPC
It would be great to find companies bidding for specific keywords, especially if you are in the business of PPC.
B.) Traffic
i.) If you are a content marketer, checking out how many visits a website gets could tell you if they were a good company to target. If the page was getting less than 1000 visits a month, they are clearly not trying hard enough with their website.
Where do you find this information?
Make use of tools such as SemRush and Crunchbase.
ii.)Alexa Rank
We are not huge fans of Alexa Ranking because it tends to be inaccurate. The reason?
“Alexa rank is calculated using a proprietary methodology that combines a site’s estimated traffic and visitor engagement over the past three months.
Traffic and engagement are estimated from the browsing behavior of people in our global panel, which is a sample of all Internet users.” _ The Alexa Blog
Alexa tracks those who have a bar installed based on how many people have that specific chrome extension or pages.
C.) Ad Spend
If a company is running Facebook ads, marketing campaigns, and even placing ads in magazines, it tells you that this company has a budget for marketing.
They may or may not be doing well with it. If you wanted to target companies for marketing purposes, you would definitely want to target companies that are spending money on advertising because it means they have the budget for it.
Communities
Have a look at different groups on social media to filter out accounts to target.
A.) Linkedin groups to find information on psychographics.
Example: Let’s say that you wanted to find marketers who are interested in organic products. There will be a community of people on:
B.)Facebook Groups
C.) Slack channel
You could then scrape all the information in these groups to create a list of the best customers for your product service.
Reviews
When it comes to filtering by reviews, you may want to find companies doing well or poorly depending on what you’re selling.
Therefore you would filter by:
A.)Number
B.)Rating
C.)Poor Quality Service
Example:
if you have a tool that speeds up slow websites or speeds up software web apps, you could go to Capterra and do a keyword search for tools that are listed, and the keyword you would use is “slow”; Once you have all the results, you can then export all the tools that show up as “slow.”
This will allow you to identify all the people who need your services to speed up their products.
Reviews will definitely give you an indication of which companies need help.
- Yelp
- Trip Advisor
- Angie’s List
- BBB
Geography
If you are looking for B2B companies in a specific area, then filtering by location will help you find the right accounts.
Look at:
A.)Cities
B.)Zipcodes
C.)Countries.
Language
Remember, you could also use language as a filter. For example, if you target a geographic such as France, you could always send an email in French to ensure a higher response rate.
Be aware of the languages that people use in a specific area, as this can affect your metrics; If you use English, for example, when the common language is German, your marketing strategy might not work so well.
Filtering by language can work well for those in the translation space or if you are looking to hire someone who might speak a specific language.
Industry
Most people think that targeting accounts by industry is the best way to find your ideal go-to-market. Still, the problem is that Linkedin, Crunchbase, and Zoominfo describe as an industry is always different. They never talk the same language.
For example, if you are a fitness app, you might be labeled as health, wellness, fitness, software, or something else. The industry filter can be pretty broad and not as targeted as you would like.
Industry is self-selected, so it might be a bit harder to find your ideal customer profile, as they could have listed themselves as something completely different from what you would have listed them as.
Services Provided/ Who they service
A.) Clutch.com
Suppose you don’t really care about what industry your stakeholders are in but are only interested in knowing what services they provide or who they service. In that case, you can use data points such as Clutch.com, an agency directory that allows you to see what services companies are offering.
B.) Inurl.com
You could also type “inurl: com/services” and then type whatever services you want a company to be giving. Google will then give you a result for what you are looking for.
Technographic data/ Technology
Filtering by technology or technographic data via:
A.) Used
B.) Used to use tech
It is a great way to find out which companies use a specific form of tech or not using it.
For example, if you wanted to find old school law firms, you could scrape a lawyer directory called Martindale. Once you have a list of websites, you could feed it into Google and add the keyword “Fax.”
If a fax number comes up on Google, it will mean that the law firm still uses a fax number. This could indicate that they might be interested in a technological update.
Local
A.) Retail Location
You may want to go after retailers who are of a certain caliber. You can then narrow that down by how many places they have on Yelp, for example.
Web Feature
A.) Has a website
B.) Has no website
Imagine if you are a video production agency, and you want to target companies that don’t have any videos on their website because this might mean that they could use your services.
Or you might want to target companies that have videos on their website, as it shows that they have pricing on hand for video production.
But also note that videos need to be updated constantly. The company might release a new product or have something new to share; therefore, they could use your services.
You could also find out from a company’s website if they are using certain tools like Hubspot, and you might be able to offer them a better, more affordable option, for example.
If a company doesn’t have a website and you are a web design business, targeting these companies would be a good idea.
Keywords
Keyword filters can come in handy if you look for companies that describe themselves by a specific keyword. For example, we once knew a company that was selling courses to large corporations on home gardening while everyone was working from home.
They wanted to target companies that valued their company culture.
So we went to Glassdoor.com and added in the keyword “strong company culture.” You could also look at companies about pages, and if they mentioned how they value their company culture, you would know that they are a good business to target.
Using a keyword to narrow down the beliefs of an organization can be really powerful.
But did you know that you can also use negative keywords to find exactly what you are looking for? You can put all caps in the Linkedin keywords bar, and it will acknowledge it? So how would you add in these negative keywords to your advantage?
It’s pretty simple.
You can do a Boolean search on Linkedin Sales Navigator.
See the example below:
If you’re looking for a list of those who do “demand generation OR demand gen,” you can add “NOT” in capitals and add “consultant” or “NOT freelancer” or even “NOT student.”;
You can add the word “NOT” to whatever it is that you want to avoid.
All the results will still show up, but it avoids whatever would be a bad fit for your business. Everything still shows up but takes out what’s a bad fit for your business.
See the step by step process below:
Step 1: Go into the job title area and type in a word like “consultant.”
Step 2: Press enter
Step 3: Hover the mouse over the “do not sign” it turns red, and it becomes “negative keywords.”
Step 4: Add in your negative keywords. You can add even as many as 50 negative keywords at a time.
You can see an example of this in the below screenshot.
In Conclusion
There are many filters that marketing teams use, but hopefully, having a look at some of the above less common B2B marketing filters will add some new life to your playbook and sales to your pipeline.
If you would like to see what SalesBread can do for your business, contact us below or schedule a free 15 min consultation.
We are an account-based marketing company that has 14 years of experience in lead generation.
