Sales Prospecting Techniques
Sales Prospecting Techniques, How Prospecting Works?
At first, when a lead encounters your product or service and demonstrates the willingness and interest, the lead is more likely to become your potential customer and thus the lead is known as a prospect. What it means to you is that the lead is ready to move toward the next stages of the sales pipeline. A sales pipeline is a flow of prospects through a sale.
Now you are familiar with the prospecting, here are some sales prospecting techniques,
Phone Calls
Getting prospects to answer your phone call is the major challenge when cold calling. Regardless of how great your product and pitch is, it does not mean anything unless you can talk to someone.
Phone calls or Cold calling is perhaps one of the most popular and effective sales prospecting techniques. Though the cold call is cold many times because you cold call people to pitch your product or service that they have never heard of it. You can turn the cold call intention into the warm one by adapting other online prospecting tools. By strategically exposing certain information about your products to the prospects, you only warm call buyers as they have an idea of what you sell. You cannot just follow the same template, the crucial element of warm calling is researching your prospect.
Thanks to the internet technologies for opening some channels to find basic info about the prospects such as the workplace, interests, pain points, etc. So as you see the phone calls do not necessarily mean cold calls and you can make your calls initially warm.
Emails
Like Phone calls, the email, especially cold email is another popular and effective sales prospecting techniques of reaching out to your prospects. The crucial element of cold emails is understanding buyer psychology. Typically for email prospecting, we contact the relevant industry professionals time and again. The email is still the cost-effective prospecting methods and that’s all fine but how do you know if the companies can afford your services to accommodate their needs?
As with cold calls, by understanding the buyer psychology, always try “to warm them up” and pitching what your products or services can help the companies with in advance.
With all businesses going digital, it is now easy and simple to identify prospects. Among all other platforms, LinkedIn provides accurate data. LinkedIn groups are good for raising brand awareness, establishing oneself as an industry expert and applying sales prospecting methods to get new clients.
One common mistake is that you don’t just grow your connections. If someone accepts your LinkedIn request does not mean they have opened the door for you to pitch your product or service. You need a little more courting before you make any pitch. You want to make sure you are building the connections with the right person.
Some recommended practices would be to comment, respond to other’s questions and raise your questions, and share your useful learnings. As a company, you could share an informative newsletter or webinar that focuses on solving a problem. Then invite them to sign up for your weekly / bi-monthly or monthly newsletter.
Surprised? Facebook is still popular in many parts of the world and still serves a great platform for promoting your product.
Try targeting the “professional” groups on Facebook usually, they are closed ones. However, you will be accepted if you prove your ability to bring value, which is determined by your responses to group specific questions. If you are dealing with the B2C segment, then Facebook ranks top among the sales prospecting techniques.
Quora, Medium, & other forums
The forums such as Quora, Medium, etc., have strong domain authority and your ever-green articles or responses will attract people who are interested in services similar to yours. If you provide helpful answers to the readers, you may convert them into a prospect and possibly even clients in no time.
The trade and promotional events, meet-ups almost happen in every city on every topic. Some events are free as well. Attend these events to find out where your target audiences are hanging out. I believe you have a good idea about the sales prospecting techniques and please contact us for further consultation on sales or developing the Go-To-Market strategy.
