(This article was originally published on Power Almanac’s site.)
If you market and sell to local governments, there’s one easy thing you can do to supercharge your prospecting efforts. Start treating your B2G and B2B prospects differently by adding additional CRM fields to support municipal/county prospecting.
The segmentation and personalization that this enables will dramatically increase your odds of getting the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time.
Must have CRM fields for local gov prospecting
Personalization converts
Ideally, whether you’re sending 10,000 emails or making 500 prospecting calls, no two messages are the same. Each one would be personalized with CRM information. Not only does it make prospects feel like you’re reaching out to them personally, but it also lowers your odds of getting caught in spam filters. Thankfully, technology makes it easy to merge CRM data into your messaging at scale.
The right local government
There are about 21,000 local governments with populations over 1,000 in the United States. And not all of them may be a good fit for your business because of factors like geography or population. For example, if you sell snowplows, you’ll want to exclude southern states.
Or if you sell small city Code Enforcement software, you might include cities with populations under 10k. Don’t waste your prospecting time or inbox exposure on bad fit prospects. Focus on being relevant instead.
The right department
Please don’t make separate top-level accounts in your CRM for departments like Police, Public Works or the Mayor’s Office. Instead, make them child accounts of their parent municipal account or include the department’s name when labeling opportunities.
Local government purchasing is a team sport and organizing it this way supports account-based sales and marketing efforts. And WATCH OUT – many data sources (but not Power Almanac) split local governments out into multiple “agencies” so you’ll need to recombine them when you add them to your CRM.
The right person
Of course, you want to reach the right person. Luckily, adding a contact-level field of “Role” to your CRM makes it a whole lot easier to focus on decision makers. For example, an option under “Role” might be “Top Appointed Executive.” You’ll also want to make “Role” a multi-select field as many local government employees serve in more than one role.
Roles are also useful for grouping contacts that serve the same function but have wildly different titles. For example, “Top Appointed Executive” encompasses 800+ titles ranging from “City Manager” to “Acting Borough Administrator” to “Parish Manager.”
Finally, you’ll want to add a “Record last verified” field to let you know when it’s time to review a contact’s information. Due to turnover and changes in emails, phone numbers, names, etc. local government contact data decays at a rate of 3-4% per month or about 40% a year!
The right time
It’s hard to overcome the status quo. That’s why you want to reach out to local gov decision makers when something has changed. Like when they’re new to their role, an election just happened, it’s the start or end of a fiscal year, or it’s budget planning season.
Conversations that matter
Adding a handful of fields to your CRM in support of local gov prospecting will greatly increase your chances of getting the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time. Start conversations that matter and sell more, faster.
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