B2B prospect identification and targeting has come a long way in the last few years. Things that once seemed impossible are now taken for granted. We can now identify with some precision when someone in a company is actively in the market for a new product. We can take this purchase interest information and bump it against company firmographic data to help qualify and score this individual as a lead. We can easily review the business contacts of this person to see if we know people in common. We can view the work history of this person, and even order a deep background report based on public domain data. We can order an organization chart for this person’s company to understand where he or she fits in the hierarchy of the business, as well as to identify other possible purchase influencers. Pretty impressive, right?

But what if we could go further? What if we could get something close to a psychological profile of the prospect to better understand how to interact with that person to advance the sales conversation. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there is a company working on it.

The company is called CaliberMind. By mining public domain data, email exchanges with the prospect and even recorded telephone conversations with the prospect (prior consent to recording is required by Caliber Mind), CaliberMind can provide a salesperson with deep and unique insights into the personality and motivations of the prospect, along with recommendations on how to engage them most productively.

Yes, there is an inherently creepy aspect to this, but CaliberMind stresses it only works with public information and freely shared information between the salesperson and prospect. What it does, besides mining these information nuggets, is interprets them in order to build a deep profile of the prospect and specific tips on how to accelerate the sales process. Not surprisingly, the company was founded by former intelligence agents.

This is cutting-edge stuff from a young company, but in many respects it seems to be the logical culmination of the various selling tools that have been introduced over the past few years. CaliberMind is leveraging both increased computing power and the explosion of public domain information to help inform and accelerate the B2B sales selling process. CaliberMind also represents just one more piece of evidence that data opportunities are everywhere – and that the tools needed to collect, process and apply data continue to get more and more powerful.