Need Leads? You are wasting time if you don’t have a strong prospecting strategy. Here are the 10 most essential prospecting tips:
What’s the key to boosting your bottom line? Prospecting, whether for customers, independent sales, or business partners, is the key.
If you don’t have a strategy to gauge prospects, you’re falling behind your competition. This is incremental to increasing your sales and revenue, so it’s worth your attention.
This guide will cover how to develop a strategy that works.
Now, let’s get into the top 10 prospecting tips you can start using today.
1. Research, Research, Research
Indeed, you knew this was going to be on the list somewhere. And when you’re in the marketing and sales department, there’s no way around it.
It would help if you did your B2B marketing sizing and research. Without it, you are in the dark and effectively overcome your organization’s future negatively.
It is number one on the list because of its priority. If you don’t qualify prospects beforehand, you’ll likely waste valuable time and money reaching out to them.
So, in this stage, you want to identify data that tells you everything you need to know about your target customer, such as their age range, professions, geo-location, and other demographics.
Next, you must begin eliminating prospects who don’t meet the criteria. Other questions you want to answer include whether they are within your territory and whether you have a product in their industry.
For example, if your target market is mid-sized businesses with 100 to 1,000 employees, then anyone who does not meet this criteria will be wiped off the list.
2. Prioritize Your List Before Prospecting
Now, before you begin initiating your strategy, you have to prioritize your list of prospects. This will further save you time and effort.
There are different levels of prioritization to focus on. You want to create different buckets for your prospects based on the above criteria.
Your buckets should be ranked by level of importance. The higher the percentage, the higher the priority of contacting them first.
For instance, the size of the opportunity may be a high priority, and anyone falling within that bucket would receive a 70% bonus. Then, the timing of closing deals, which is less critical, gets a 5% bonus.
3. Get Ready for Outreach
Once you have your priorities, it’s time to prepare for the outreach. What makes this particularly important is that your outreach must be personalized. So, hopefully, your research is very detailed.
Customer buyer personas must help identify what pain points to address and which products or services to touch on.
Then, you can conduct more research by looking for prospect blogs, social media profiles, and “about us” pages.
These can be very telling and will help personalize your approach when reaching out to them.
4. Reaching Out to Prospects for the First Time
You can reach out to prospects the first time around in various ways. For instance, you can call, email, or connect on social media.
However, if you decide to reach out, make sure to:
- Personalize your message
- Stay relevant and timely
- Be human
- Offer to help, not sell
- Stay casual
You’ll find that emails and calls have pros and cons. For instance, emails are visual and give the prospect time to consider your offer. Yet, they’re not as personal as a phone call and can be overwhelming.
So you’ll have to play your cards right based on the prospect and their preferences.
5. Take Lots and Lots of Notes
Whatever you didn’t learn from your data and research will be known here. Once you speak with prospects, you can ask questions and learn more about their concerns and needs.
This way, you can determine the value of their lives. Some of the things you want to do include:
- Uncover their challenges
- Create a list of defined goals
- Confirm available budget
- Determine the consequences of inaction
- Identify potential success results
- Understand the decision-making process
With this data, you can significantly improve your future calls or emails with the prospect.
6. Create a Script
This sounds very awkward, but it’s not like you think. You’re not sitting there reading the script word-for-word, and how could you?
You never really know where a phone call may take you. However, you can use the script as a roadmap to identify key points to touch on or questions to ask when the conversation takes that turn.
Having a script can be very helpful in making a valuable call for both you and the prospect. So definitely consider adding scripts to your prospecting strategy.
7. Aim to Educate, Not Sell
This goes for all of your marketing and sales. The key is to educate your prospects so that they can make the sale for you. The rest is easy if you convince them they need your product or service.
But the key is to inform, not sell. Let’s take a car salesman, for example. If he isn’t listening to what you’re saying and insists you purchase a car to help his bottom line, you’ll walk away.
However, you’re more likely to buy from a salesman who pays attention and presents a vehicle that meets your needs exactly. And the same goes for you.
It would help to listen to your prospect’s needs and offer them a solution. As the saying goes, sell the sizzle, not the steak. In other words, show them the benefits, not the features.
8. Never Procrastinate
Time is essential, so you must act quickly to seal the deal. Once you identify a high-priority prospect, you must reach out immediately.
This way, you can catch them in their time of need and offer a solution. Then, you make your sale, and you become their superhero.
9. Put Social Media to Use
Social media is an excellent tool for first touchpoints and subsequent interactions. It’s the perfect setting to warm them up to the sale. At this point, you’re building a relationship and trust.
Then, once you do this, you can make the sales call.
10. Get Used to Hearing No
Getting every prospect to say yes is impossible, so hearing no is inevitable. Get used to it quickly, accept it, and move on.
Mulling over your failures will only prevent you from reaching out to the prospect who will say yes.
Learn More About Generating Solid Leads
Business profits revolve around getting hot leads. And what better way to do that than with prospecting? You can use this and other methods to generate leads and improve your bottom line.
At Megaleads, you can find tips and tricks for doing just that. If you want information on enhancing your sales techniques, this blog is for you.
Stop by today to see what you can learn to improve your sales strategy.
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