Sales Prospecting: Tips, Templates,Techniques,To Succeed
Imran Khan Poonawalla
Founder & Ceo - Leads Bazaar LLC - (#Largest Collection of High Quality B2B & B2C Leads)
According to recent research 7 out of 10 buyers want to hear from salespeople early on in the buying process. In fact, 82% of buyers accept meetings when a salesperson reaches out first.
Prospecting is one of the key stages of sales process. Up to 42% of sales reps named prospecting as the most challenging stage of the sale process,
Read below about the templates, techniques, you need to make your sales prospecting strategies as effective as possible from this very moment.
Sales prospecting is a pillar of any sound sales process according to research it helps you reach you sales objective and your business goals.
Sales prospecting can be every bit as frustrating as it is essential. That’s why we’ve made this super simple step by step guide to help you navigate the process and save some time.
Here, what we’ll cover in this article:
1 What Prospecting Is?
2 How to Accurately Prospect
3 Important Sales Prospecting Tips
4 Sales Prospecting
5 What’s Sales Prospecting Process
6 Difference Between Outbound vs Inbound Prospecting
7 Common Sales Prospecting Questions
8 Practical Prospecting Email Examples
9 Prospect Marketing Explanation & Conclusion
What is prospecting?
Explaining Prospecting in simple words is nothing but a process of initiating and developing new business by searching for potential customers, clients, or buyers for your products or services. The goal is to move these prospects through the conversion funnel until they convert to revenue-generating customers for your business or service.
Research
It’s extremely effective, too. According to recent research Research from RAIN Group found that more than 7 out of 10 buyers want to hear from salespeople early on in the buying process. In fact, 82% of buyers accept meetings when a salesperson reaches out first.
Best-performing salespeople generate nearly 3X more sales meetings via prospecting than those who don’t prospect at all.
When prospecting is done successfully, you can schedule meetings with better-fit leads — ones with a legitimate need for or interest in your offering. Good-fit customers generally provide more long-term business and help you grow overtime and generate revenue in the long term.
They eventually become valuable customers, and they’re much less likely to churn shortly after closing a deal than their worse-fit counterparts. But how can you identify good-fit customers? Well, that typically starts by asking the right for more insight on that process,and asking right questions.
The endgame when interacting with prospects and leads is the same — to nurture them until they buy your product or service. That process begins the moment you start prospecting and doesn’t end until you close them.
How to Accurately Prospect
Try not not do unproductive prospecting that’s a huge time-waste, and certain approaches have proven to be more effective than others. To get the most out of your efforts, we recommend leveraging the further article to get the best out of it.
Do a proper research on your prospect and their business to gauge whether you can provide value.You’re going to hear this again and again throughout this post but you can’t prospect effectively if you don’t qualify prospects.It’s by far the most important aspect of prospecting. You can’t provide value to a business if you have no idea what’s valuable to them in the first place.
Next You should look to accomplish a few goals in this stage of prospecting initially
Examine and determine if the prospect is workable
Categorize your prospects based on their likelihood of becoming an ideal customer.It might go without saying, but closing with some prospects is more viable than it is with others. So if you want to save yourself time and maximize your deal potential, you need to know where to dedicate most of your time and effort — that starts with prioritizing the right prospects.and how will you do that?
How you will prioritize your prospects will likely be specific to many different factors like your role, your vertical, and your sales org’s preferences. But regardless of those elements, the fundamental concept always boils down to one common process — creating a few buckets of prospects and focusing on one at a time and nurturing them.
Usually prospects are qualified according to certain dimensions, meaning certain characteristics — including factors like deal size or timing — are deemed more important than others when identifying viable prospects. Those elements hold more weight when qualifying prospects.
Prepare a value adding personalized pitch for each prospect.
Each & Every prospect is unique with their own unique backgrounds, interests, needs, and preferences and absolutely none of them want to be treated like another name on a list.
That’s why first you need to gather in-depth information on your prospects — ensuring you can put together effective, personalized pitches and conduct more thoughtfully targeted outreach.
But you can’t do that without understanding what your prospects care about — and there are a few ways you can figure that out, including:
Now that you’ve learned more about your prospect’s business and role, you need to find a reason to connect. Do you have mutual connections? Has there been a trigger event? Have they recently visited your website? If so, which search terms drove them to your site? Which pages did they look at?
If you want to get more high-level with your prep, you can create a mind map to outline the prospect’s options and end goals. That can help you better handle any objections and personalize a pitch that aligns with their primary objectives.
Design the perfect first touch — and ensure you’re helping, not selling.
As we just touched on, personalization is key to crafting an effective pitch but its utility isn’t limited to what you’re going to say. If you want to prospect effectively, you need to personalize how you start your conversations with your prospect.
Regardless of whether you call or email, your outreach needs to be tailored to suit your prospect’s business, goals, needs, industry, and personal preferences.
Keep these tips in mind when contacting a prospect, whether on the phone or through email, if you want your outreach to be as specific and effective as possible:
Learn and understand what you can improve and become better.
Effective prospecting isn’t stagnant. You need to constantly track, learn from, and ultimately improve upon your process constantly refining your approach and finding a groove that will consistently deliver results.
Every time you engage in prospecting, keep notes throughout the process assess what activities generated value for the prospecting process and which wasted time.
Hurray… Now, let’s take a look at a few tips straight from the sales desk on how to better qualify prospects and win more deals.
Important Sales Prospecting Tips
Framework
Sound prospecting is about identification and consultation meaning you need to be able to identify prospects who will be receptive to your efforts and frame yourself as a consultative resource to almost-instantly build trust in your initial conversations.
Ask for Referrals
By asking for referrals, you can generate a wider base of warmer, more easily convertible contacts giving yourself a crucial leg up when prospecting. When an existing customer connects you with a referral, they’re essentially saying, “I think this person could stand to gain from your solution.”
Pros & Cons Email Communication
Pros & Cons Phone Communication
Most effective sequence for emails and calls
Sales Prospecting Process
Let’s say you’ve decided whom to pursue. Now, it’s time to get even more detail the nurturing process ideally resulting in a closed-won deal. Regardless of what your sales pipeline looks like, you’ll typically go through the following phases.
1. Research
2. Outreach
3. Discovery Call
4. Evaluate
5. Close
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Research:Effective prospecting begins by further researching the prospects whom we’ve determined are generally a good fit. The goal during this phase is to determine the quality of the prospect and how likely they are to make a purchase, based on factors like their budget and challenges you do have to examine.
Outreach:Once you’ve qualified the prospect, you need to reach out to someone at the business and once you’ve identified that contact, you can connect with them directly using a sales prospecting email.
Discovery Call:After connecting with a gatekeeper, you’re going to want to schedule a discovery call a preliminary conversation with a prospect where you ask thoughtful, relevant questions to uncover a prospect’s goals, interests, and pain points.
A discovery call is a unique opportunity for you to simultaneously understand and impress your prospect. Asking the right questions on your call can help you tease out the information needed to understand whether your offering suits their business giving you a solid basis for an effective value proposition.And by having a conversational, disarming conversation on the call — without sacrificing professionalism — you can plant the seeds of a productive working relationship with your prospect.
Evaluate:After your discovery call, you need to use the insight you gathered to evaluate and qualify the prospect’s needs. This stage provides the basis for whether a prospect legitimately needs your solution, how viable a potential deal is if they do, and how to frame your value proposition and making it one of the most (if not the most) crucial steps listed here.pain points and potential objections.
Pain point A company’s pain points are the issues, concerns, or gaps in its operations that your product or service could remedy. With the information from your discovery call, you should be able to piece together what those aspects look like.
Objections You also need to be mindful of potential objections your prospect might raise. Those can include elements like budget or time constraints. When preparing for this side of the process, make sure you thoroughly understand the pain points you identified and the state of the business in general.
Close:At this point, you should have all the information you need. You know the prospect’s challenges, pain points, and possible objections. Now, it’s time to try to turn them into customers — to demonstrate and convey the value you can offer them. This will result in one of two outcomes:
Common Sales Prospecting Questions? FAQ’s
Knowing who to pursue saves us a significant amount of time. Not every lead is fit to be a prospect, and not every prospect will become a paying customer. Luckily, you can ask a few questions that can help you determine whether a prospect is worth pursuing.
Even if you use outbound prospecting methods, you should see a much better response rate because you took care to vet their business for suitability.
Is the prospect’s business an organizational a proper fit?
This type of qualification is based solely on demographics. Does the prospect fall within your territory? Do you sell in their industry? Does it fit your buyer persona?
Say your target market consists of small- to medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 100 to 10,000 employees. You should eliminate any potential customers outside of these criteria.
Note: Prioritize customers based on the size of the opportunity or their potential lifetime value
Identify key stakeholders or decision makers?
There are two types of people involved on the other end of your sales process: decision-makers and influencers.
Influencers may not have the power to buy, but they’re often the ones that will be using the product and thus can become your biggest internal advocates. If you get them to rally around your offering, they can make a compelling case to decision-makers before you even speak with them.
Decision-makers are, of course, the ones that either approve or reject the buy. You can ask these questions to determine the decision-making process: Will anyone else be involved in this decision? Does this purchase come out of your immediate budget?
So you need to ensure that you get through this process and offer your deal to the stakeholders.
Note: Keep a list of influencers and buyers, perhaps mapped out by the organizational structure of the organization.
Are the prospect’s constraints a deal-breaker or deal maker?
Time constraints and budget limitations are often the biggest objections you’ll receive from prospects. Before wasting time on an exploratory call to hear this objection, do some homework beforehand to see if you can filter out potential buyers who clearly don’t have the bandwidth to consider your offering.
Note: If you see a prospect has just launched a new marketing campaign, they might not have the time to cycle through an extensive sales process.
Do you have experience and knowledge with the prospect’s market?
You’re likely to be more familiar with certain types of companies, markets, or industries than others. Your sales techniques are also likely to be more refined with markets you feel comfortable talking about, so you should prioritize these prospects first.
Note: Group similar prospects by characteristics such as their service offering, their market, or their industry, and prioritize these groups based on your familiarity with them.
Have awareness of your offering?
our prospects will likely have varying levels of knowledge about your product or services. The more awareness they have, the more likely they are to see the value in your offering and become customers.
If a prospect has visited your website, subscribed to your blog, or posted content about something related to your offering, they probably know a lot about your company or service.
Note: Group prospects by their level of awareness so you can take advantage of this familiarity later in the sales process.
Practical Prospecting Email Examples
Are you ready to reach out to prospects? The following email templates will help you get started.
1. REACHING OUT AFTER A REFERRAL
[Name of referrer] recommended
Hey [prospect name],
It’s great to meet you. Our mutual connection, [name of referrer], recommended I get in contact with you because [X].
I would love to hear more about what you do in your role — according to [name of referrer], it seems like you may be facing [X] challenges.
[Product name] can help you achieve [X] and increase efficiency by [X]%.
Is that a priority for your team right now?
Best,
[Your name]
2. CONGRATULATING THEM FOR AN AWARD OR PUBLICATION
Congrats on [award]
Hi [prospect name],
Congratulations on receiving [award]! That’s a rare accomplishment — kudos to you and the team.
Now, to introduce myself, I’m a [title] at [company]. I work with small businesses in your industry to achieve [X] results. Just last week, [competitor] told me they finally reached their goal of [X], boosting their ROI to [X]%.
I’d love to chat and see whether we can get similar, if not better, results for you. Would you be available for a ten-minute call on Friday?
Best,
[Your name]
Difference Between Outbound vs Inbound Prospecting
OUTBOUND VS INBOUND PROSPECTING
Sales, as a field, is constantly shifting, and naturally, how prospecting is conducted is shifting with it. Sales reps no longer have to choose between inbound or outbound prospecting — now, they have the flexibility to decide whether they want to incorporate elements of both into their efforts.
Outbound prospecting is when you reach out to leads who haven’t yet expressed an interest in your product or business. You typically identify prospects through independent research — by finding them via LinkedIn, Google, or another platform.
Inbound prospecting is when you reach out to a lead who shows an active interest in your business or product. They’ve visited your website, subscribed to your blog, or maybe even submitted a form asking to speak to a sales rep. You then engage with them to understand whether they’d be a good fit for the product.
Here are the key differences between the two methodologies.
Prospect Marketing Explanation & Conclusion
Prospect marketing is a brand of content marketing a business leverages deeper in its sales process than most other types of marketing. It involves providing a prospect with media like sales collateral, technical documents, and other resources to help influence their decision-making as they move closer to closing.
Prospect marketing is essentially bringing a prospect into the flywheel and closer to, well, Close. Just because you connect with a prospect doesn’t mean you should stop all marketing efforts. Instead, your marketing should become more personalized and targeted.
Prospect marketing is essentially bringing a prospect into the flywheel and closer to, well, Close. Just because you connect with a prospect doesn’t mean you should stop all marketing efforts. Instead, your marketing should become more personalized and targeted.
Begin Your Sales Prospecting
Prospecting doesn’t have to be a difficult and tedious process. In fact, it can be a positive experience for both sales reps and prospects. Adopt a few of the strategies we reviewed above into your workflow and experiment with different techniques and tools to see what works best for your team. Then, you’ll be sure to begin converting more good-fit prospects into paying customers.
Conclusion
Prospecting can turn out to be the best strategy for your business or service if done it correctly it will help you achieve your objective and get less frustrated with the overwhelming information out there about prospecting.
You first need to understand prospecting in detail so you can benefit the most out of it and in this above article we made it super simple and easy for you to understand and start experimenting with it from now itself.
What are you waiting for?
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