As a salesperson, one of the most important things you can do is to develop a strong sales prospecting process. By having a system in place for finding and qualifying potential customers, you’ll be able to close more deals and grow your business.There are many different ways to go about sales prospecting, but not all methods will work for every business.
The key is to find what works best for you and your team. To help get you started, here are three proven sales prospecting processes and best practices that can help you close more deals:
What Is Sales Prospecting?
Sales prospecting is the process of finding and qualifying potential customers for your product or service. It involves identifying your target market, researching your potential customers, and reaching out to them with your sales pitch.
The goal of sales prospecting is to find customers who are interested in what you’re selling and who are likely to buy from you.
The importance of sales prospecting
Prospecting is important because you can find customers that need help solving their challenges and close more sales.
Prospecting is important because connecting with customers early in the sales process makes it more likely they will respond to your pitch.
82% of salespeople who reach out directly are successful in setting up meetings with their prospect.
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Top performing salespeople are 3 times more likely to get meetings with their prospective clients than low-performing ones.
After you’ve finished your outbound sales, you’ll have meetings scheduled with leads that are a better fit for your product. These good fit customers are more valuable than the ones who only buy once.
You can qualify your lead and prospect list by asking questions that will reveal whether or not they’re a good fit for your product or service.
Prospecting is important because, by asking qualifying questions and determining a prospect’s level of interest, you can determine whether or not to pursue the lead. By asking sales prospecting questions, you will be able to differenciate between a lead and prospect which will also help you tailor the conversation during your next sales pitch.
Lead Vs Prospect
Leads are the customers that have shown interest in your business through actions such as viewing your site, following your blog, or trying your product.
Prospecting is the act of finding and vetting potential sales opportunities.
A potential customer is anyone who has had no prior contact with your business.
Although your end goal with both types of contacts is the same, how you go about reaching that goal differs. The nurture process for a lead and a prospect begin as soon as you prospect and up until the day you close the deal with either.
This entire process of sales begins with your very first prospect and continues until you finally seal the deal with that customer.
How to Prospect
To effectively make sales, you should thoroughly understand who you’re selling to. This includes researching their industry, company, and role.
Then, you should rank your list of potential customers based on the likelihood of them becoming customers. Then, you should personalize each sales pitch to that individual.
Lastly, you should perfect your first point of contact — whether it be an email, phone call, or in-person meeting — by making it helpful, not pushy. Continually iterate on your sales process to see what can be improved.
The inbound sales method is the best way to approach prospecting. We’ve put together a framework that outlines all stages of the process.
But with a twist.
B2B Sales Prospecting Strategies
We’ve included some sales tips from some of the best in the business. Try them out and see what works for your sales process.
1. Do some research on your prospects and their company before calling them.
The most important aspect of a successful sale is qualifying your lead. You must ensure that your product provides value to your potential customer.
To do this, you’ll want to do prospect research and their business to see if you can provide value. This means looking into their:-Company-Industry-Market-Sales process-Competitors
2. Sort your list of prospects based on the likelihood of them becoming customers.
Prioritizing our sales prospecting activities can help us save time and energy, allowing us to focus on the most qualified candidates.
Different sales organizations will have different priorities, but the general idea here is to categorize your prospects into a few groups based on the likelihood of them buying from you. Then, focus on one group or type of prospect before moving on to the next.
Now, we’ll break down the process of qualifying a lead into 4 separate stages. We’ll assign a 1% to 100% value to each based on how important they are to the sales process.
The importance of the opportunity (70%) versus the timing (5%) of a sale is weighed more heavily than other factors.
1. Rank each of your subscribers on a scale of 1-100.2. Take each subscriber’s rank and multiply it by the percentage of importance you assigned to that characteristic.
Now, add up these dimensions until each lead has a score. And our list is now ranked.
Note that lead management programs do this for you.
3. Personalize Your Pitch
In this next step, we’re going to figure out exactly what our prospect cares about.
We can either do this in a few ways:
We can also do a quick Google search to see if there is any recent news about the company or the prospect.Once we have a good understanding of the prospect, we can prepare a personalized pitch that will be much more likely to resonate.
Once we’ve learned more about our prospect and their company, we need a way to connect with them. Do we have any mutual connections?
Have they been to our website before? Have they been to our site before?
What brought them to our website? What specific page did they view?
If we want to be even more prepared, we can outline our prospect’s options, objectives, and end goals by creating a decision map. This will allow us to better understand their objections to our sales pitch and tailor our message accordingly.
We can perform a competitive analysis to determine how we can distinguish ourselves from competitors and how we can address any objections.
4. Perfect your first contact with a prospect by making sure you’re actually helping them, not selling them.
Our outreach efforts should be customized to our specific target’s business, goals, and industries.
When reaching out to your prospects, keep these tips in mind:
When reaching out to your prospects, be sure to personalize each message, be timely and relevant, be personable, and keep things light. By doing these things, you’ll have a better chance of establishing a connection with your contact and determining if there’s a potential for a beneficial business relationship.
5. Iterating on your sales process will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Keep track of how much time you’re spending on each activity. This will help you assess which activities are generating value and which are wasting your time.
After each interaction with a lead, we should evaluate how successful we were.
After each interaction with a lead, we should evaluate how effectively we helped the prospect define their challenges and set goals. We should then confirm their budget and confirm that they’re available to make a decision.
This reflection will teach us how to improve our selling skills.
3 Key Steps In Sales Prospecting Process
Your team has a contact list of people who have expressed interest in your company, but the problem is that the people on the list have never heard of you or your business.
Should sellers write letters, send emails, or make phone calls? What should they say?
Instead of wasting your time on trying to start conversations with people who aren’t interested, there are tools that’ll help you reach out to your most promising customers.
When done right, your sales team will have the perfect message at their finger tips to pique the interest of potential clients.
This won’t be a quick fix. You’ll need to strategize, coordinate and plan with marketing.
But, if you commit to making more sales, your team will have more contacts to call, more time to pitch, and shorter closing times.
1. Understand the customer journey
As your prospects move through the buying process, they’ll need different types of information from you. By figuring out what type of info they’re looking for, you can better help them through their journey.
2 Create Quality Content
To create quality content: 1. Go through all of your existing content and divide it into categories based on where in the buying cycle your buyers are. 2. Make sure all of your content is high-quality and helpful to your prospects. It should be well-researched, well-written, and tailored to your prospect’s specific needs.
You can gather information by reviewing your sales emails and past presentations and proposals for clients.
When you complete your content audit, you may find that you have some gaps. For instance, your content strategy may be heavily focused on the “Decision” stage of the buying cycle, but you may have very little (or none) in the “Awareness” or “Consideration” phases.
The marketing and sales departments should work together to create content that fills any gaps in the buyers’ journeys, and they should create a schedule to publish this content.
1. Before creating any content, evaluate how your graphics will look. If they aren’t professional, then your content won’t be either.2. Create helpful, engaging, and unique content for your readers.
It’s the difference between making a good first (or second) impression to a prospect in sweatpants as opposed to a professional business person.
If you’re not confident in your team’s ability to produce high-quality content, it may be worth considering outsourcing to professionals. A well-crafted piece of content can be a powerful lead generation tool, and a good investment that keeps paying off for years.
1. Don’t waste your time and money on content that doesn’t work.2. Focus your efforts on creating content that actually works.
3. Promote and Market Your Content
Now that you’ve learned how to craft the perfect sales script, it’s time to share it with the world. You can share the content you create in a couple of different ways:
It takes 7-12 contacts with a prospect before they’ll even consider talking to you.
Content can be used by sales people to find information they need to nurture their prospect. By stimulating a pain, a sales person can encourage their leads to buy.
Inbound marketing is an effective way to generate quality sales leads that are targeted to your specific industry. By employing techniques such as SEO, landing page creation, email, and social media channels marketing, you can attract potential customers that wouldn’t otherwise have come across your business.
Prospecting Email Examples
Use these emails as templates for reaching out to your sales prospects.
Following Up After Receiving a Referral
Hi [Prospect Name],
Hi [name],I’m so glad to have the chance to speak with you. Our mutual connection, [name of referrer], recommended that I get in touch with you because [X]. I’m really looking forward to hearing more about what you’re working on.
I’d love to hear more about what you do in your role and the challenges you face.
can help you [achieve X] and [increase efficiency by Y%].
Is that something you’re focusing on now?
Best,
[Your name]
Providing Links After They Downloaded a Resource
Hello [Prospect Name],
Great meeting you. How are you enjoying the [resource]?
I see that you are interested in [x] and have put together three more resources that’ll help you and your team do [x] even better.
I hope you find these resources helpful!
Let’s jump on a quick phone call on Thursday to see how your first quarter is shaping up. Are you free for a 10 minute call on Wednesday?
Best,
[Your name]
3. Congratulating Them for an Award or Publication
Hello [Prospect Name],
Hi [prospect name],Congratulations on receiving the [award]! That’s a rare accomplishment – kudos to you and the team. We’re proud to have you as part of our community.
Hi, my name is [name] and I work as a [title] at [company]. I help small businesses in your industry to achieve amazing results.
Just recently, [competitor] told me that they finally achieved their [goal], increasing their [ROI] to [x%].
Hi [name],I read that you recently accomplished [X] and I wanted to reach out and see if we could help you achieve similar, if not better, results. Would you be available for a ten-minute call on Friday?Best,[Your name]
Best,
[Your name]
Still stuck? Here are some more resources to help.
Congratulations on your awardpublication! This is a huge accomplishment and you should be very proud. I’m excited to see what you do next.
Don’t let your marketing efforts stop here! Keep warming your prospects up to the idea of making a purchase from you.
Conclusion
If you want to close more deals and achieve your business goals, following a sales prospecting process is key. By taking the time to build a targeted list of prospects and staying top of mind, you’ll be able to increase your chances of making a sale. Use these three processes as a starting point for developing your own system that works best for you and your team.
