Gone are the days when Sales meant fishing in your local pond—finding your customers by going door-to-door around the neighbourhood. Now, if you want to sell to bigger fish, you need access to good-quality prospect data.
But the market is saturated with data companies and tools to supply your sales team with data and, ultimately, leads. Hot leads, cold leads, warm leads—what’s vital is whether or not your leads convert. So, how can you find prospect data that will actually result in sales?
It comes down to having access to more than a list of phone numbers. It’s not even about having the correct contact information for a decision-maker. It’s about marrying those contact details with company data so you can get a full picture of the opportunities available.
TAM vs ICP
TAM is your Total Addressable Market; that’s everyone you could sell to—and there are different methods of working this out depending on your business. Your ICP or Ideal Client Profile is your perfect customer. Your Goldilocks. They’re just right.
Identifying your ICP helps you focus your sales efforts on leads more likely to convert. But first, you need to work out where, and how, to find that person.
There are two elements to this:
- Company data
- Contact data
Company data
Company data is all the information about a company that’s publically available, such as:
- Headquarters and locations
- Fundings and funders
- Grants
- Company origination, i.e. are they a spinout?
- Stage of evolution
- Annual turnover
- And more
Finding a company you want to approach is far easier than finding the right person to sell to. Beyond helping you pinpoint your ICP, company data allows you to have a more complete picture of what’s going on at a company and whether or not that key decision maker you’ve identified is in the right place to buy.
Contact data
Contact data is useable contact information about a person, such as:
- Phone number
- Email address
- Work address
- LinkedIn profile
There are plenty of popular contact data tools out there. While having accurate contact information is an essential part of selling (how could you contact anyone otherwise?), it doesn’t indicate their readiness or fit according to your ICP. Enter: company data.
It’s clear. To get the most out of your sales team, you need to have both—contact data and company data.




