So, you are selling to retail and e-commerce industries, right? Have you considered looking at their omni-channel presence as a variable to qualify against? Irrespective of whether you sell fulfillment services or tech products to the retail/e-commerce industry, omni-channel matters to your business and how you can sell to your prospects. The method you use to identify omni-channel retailers can help you with effective predictive lead generation.Are you the numbers type? Here’s a note from the research that HFNDigital did.The number of retailers moving to omni-channel has been steadily increasing. E-commerce sites are saturated with Millennials who have almost reached their home-buying years. Retailers who fail to monetize the Millennials’ online habits are soon going to lose the race. Here’s why the big players are shutting a lot of their physical stores:

Source: HFNdigital

According to BigCommerce, - “Technology has wholly disrupted the retail industry. Consumers are no longer loyal to a single brand or type of shopping. They now shop in an omni-channel fashion, sometimes buying on a mobile device while in a brick-and-mortar store, or browsing a marketplace before heading to a category-specific site.”

Convinced that you need to be aware of your e-commerce/Retail leads’ omni-channel strategy? Now, how do you find the omni-channel maturity of the retailers and e-commerce companies in your lead list?Retail data is available with a lot of big names like Datanyze, BuiltWith, ZoomInfo, etc., But the relevance of this data and its usefulness to e-commerce fulfilment and logistics data has always been knotty. With retailers going after omni-channel strategies, classifying them as retail or e-commerce has become difficult. But there are a lot of successful omni-channel fulfilment & logistics companies who are doing something right. Here’s how you can identify omni-channel retailers and do predictive lead generation for your company.

1. Do they sell only via their website?
2. Probe their website and find out if they have an App Store/ Play Store presence. This should be fairly easy to spot. Having a mobile app doesn’t indicate they have an m-commerce presence. Sometimes apps are merely product catalogs and not another medium to purchase.
3. Do they sell via their app?
4. Check out if their app has In-app purchases. This indicates that transactions actually take place via the app and they have an m-commerce presence which they want to monetize.
5. Do they sell in any marketplace?
6. Websites that sell via Amazon or any other marketplace like eBay or Etsy usually have a “Find us on *insert marketplace*” link in the header or footer of their homepage.
7. Do marketplace sellers have a presence elsewhere?
8. Sometimes, sellers on Amazon usually have a presence on other platforms as well (like their own e-commerce store or a mobile app or even, an offline store). Some may use the same name everywhere. Some may even list their website on the marketplace seller profile. If they have a logo on the seller profile, a reverse Google image search can lead you to their website.
9. Does your prospect sell wholesale?
10. e-commerce stores also selling wholesale fall into two categories - (i) Consumer brands/ manufacturers who sell in bulk to resellers/ other retailers, and  (ii) Wholesalers/ stockists/ distributors who also have a retail e-commerce site.  Consumer brands and manufacturers will talk about 'contact for wholesale/ bulk purchase' on their website. Some may also have links to B2B wholesale marketplaces like Alibaba.  Wholesalers/distributors will have “Become a retail partner” or something similar on their websites.

The biggest mistake companies do when prospecting is not valuing the time of the account executive. S/he should spend time on the pounding the pavement and not research.To research about a company, it takes 20 minutes. Let’s say they have to reach out to 500 companies a month to get 50 leads into the pipeline and close 10, they need 10,000 minutes (166 hours). That’s an entire work month. Your account executive shouldn’t be doing all the research.PipeCandy cuts the research time to 2 mins and gives neatly collated information of every prospect mapped against your qualifying criteria.With PipeCandy, All you have to do is Login > Click > Read > Call.[Link tag="https://pipecandy.com/schedule-a-demo/" title="Schedule a demo, now!"]The Only Predictive Lead Generation Platform for discovering retail & e-commerce leads![/Link]  

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