Understanding your target audience is the first thing you need to consider if you want to effectively sell. It is important to know what people need your solution, so there is a higher chance they accept the sale. This is called prospecting and qualifying, in fact, it is the first step in the sales process that every salesperson needs to accomplish effectively in order to get your solution in front of the people who actually need and want it.
What is prospecting?
According to Helen Holovach from Snov.io, prospecting is the process of identifying potential customers, finding them, and creating a base of leads with the end of goal of converting them into paying customers.
Finding prospects is an active search for potential leads, and by doing this you need to have a clear understanding of your target audience and buyer persona.
The importance of prospecting
Prospecting gives you full control over lead sources to filter out channels fit to perform best. This allows you to pick leads that are most likely to become future customers in your company.
Better conversion rate
Targeted leads
Being able to source out your potential buyers, allows you to have the opportunity to close on a lot of deals. Quality over quantity is the key to success in prospecting. It is more important to have 50 leads that are potential buyers than 150 leads that are not prospects and probably do not need your solution. Make sure you are prospecting and pay attention to whom you are targeting.
Prospecting tools
If you invest some money into a prospecting tool like a CRM or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you will see your ROI increase. In fact, having access to prospecting tools will allow you to automate certain day-to-day tasks saving you so much time to focus on other sales opportunities.
Customer churn
Customer churn can be normal in most companies. Prospecting is a quick solution to customer churn because you are constantly finding new potential leads. Furthermore, it will help you bring a constant flow of qualifying leads into your pipeline.
How to do prospecting?
The first step is to identify your target audience
Your first step is to always figure out who your best-fit customers are and learn how to define your target audience search. It is important to understand your buyer’s pain points, needs, wants, and desires. Once you know that information, you then can create a strategy that will best convert them.
The second step is to start prospecting
Prospecting is a constant search for potential leads. I personally think that LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator are the best lead sources for people just starting out. It is extremely easy to filter out and dig deep into finding potential customers on LinkedIn. The amazing part about it is, once you find a qualified lead, you can send them a personalized message and connect with them on LinkedIn to get the conversation started. There are many other tools you should use in your sales business to level yourself up such as CRMs, lead directories, LinkedIn, email finders, and message automation systems.
This takes us to the last step.
Lastly, you approach your prospects
When you are approaching potential buyers for the first time it is extremely important to build rapport and build trust with them. You should always try and provide them as much value as you can at first instead of being a pushy salesperson and only having your eyes on the sale. I am going to say it again, but try your best to start using automated outreach tools and CRM’s to make the process a lot less time-consuming. This will allow you to have more time to close deals and make more money.
Here are four great prospecting methods
Keeping your sales pipeline fresh is a crucial step if you want your process to be successful. Here are some proven methods for effective prospecting.
Network, network, network
Speaking with your personal network is a great place to start. Make a list of all your friends and family and start reaching out to them and creating meaningful conversations. This is a great starting point because you never know what opportunities can come from reaching out to people you know personally.
Another great way to network is through LinkedIn. Getting your name in front of targeted high-level professionals that you need to be consulting with can bring you endless opportunities. It is important to create these relationships and build trust so that you can do business together. If you make this a part of your strategy your sales will increase.
Lastly, do not forget to try and receive referrals from your current network. Ask them if they know anyone that is in need of your solution. You never know, you could get two big paying customers out of doing it.
Consistent follow-up
Once you start creating these meaningful relationships with potential customers, it is imperative that you follow up with them consistently. You and your team need to identify the cadence of how often you need to reach out to your customers and check in on them.
You can send them follow-up emails every two days of every month, it totally depends on the strategy that you want to implement in your prospecting strategy. Constantly checking in and fulfilling the needs of potential buyers will show them how much you and your company care to work with them. Start doing this and you will start creating massive value in people’s businesses.
Start content marketing
It helps to select a niche to push content related to the industry you are in for work. Things such as posting blogs, podcasts, and social media content are great ways to get started in content marketing.
Every piece of content you create should be a way for potential buyers to relate to and allow you to create value for them in some way. Target your potential customers in your content strategy and you will start to see a community of people start following you. You need to build your influence and have a community of people that will support you in everything that you do.
Cold outreach
This can be anything from cold calling, cold email, social media outreach, LinkedIn messaging, etc. For this to be successful, you really need to understand the people you are reaching out to and make sure they fit in your buyer persona.
The key to cold outreach is to be consistent. Be consistent in sending a specific amount of cold calls, cold emails, social media DM’s, and LinkedIn messages because you never know when someone is going to say yes to a deal, so keep reaching out.
Start by building rapport and potentially getting on a quick twenty-minute discovery call. Ask them questions related to their concerns in their business to see if they even need your solutions. Conducting a discovery call upfront saves you time by letting you know what people are worth talking to and what people don’t need your business at all.
That’s It!
I hope you enjoyed this blog post! If you are in sales or running your own business, it is very important to know how to prospect effectively and really understand what you need to do to accomplish your goals in your business.
Let me know what you think, by commenting in the section below and sharing your ideas on prospecting.
This is a very important skill to have for life, so start doing it and you will learn! I hope I added some value to your day.
NL