Sales Prospecting Tips and Methods
Prospecting can make or break your overall sales strategy. Nothing matters more than targeting the right person at the right time with the right message.
It’s all about finding where your future customers are, crafting a message that speaks to a pain they’re experiencing, and making connections to prospects that will eventually convert into customers.
But it’s easy to get stuck down a wrong path, or even worse, you may not know where to begin. We wrote this post to help guide your thought process when you build your next segment.
The Golden Rule of Prospecting
Your most important role as a salesperson is to establish trust with a prospect — otherwise, the sale probably won’t happen. Plain and simple: people buy from people that they like.
What’s the easiest/quickest way to gain that trust? Start by targeting the right people who actually have a need for your product. This takes a bit of research and work on the backend, but a cold prospect is much more likely to engage with you if they think that you already know something about their needs.
Generally speaking, here are a few simple steps to get your prospecting strategy underway:
- Identify your target customer
- Plan a basic message
- Figure out where your prospects are
- Customize your message
- Build a new relationship that you can nurture into a sale
Plus a few additional tips to get the ball rolling:
- Look at your current customers. Which ones are a really good fit? What makes them a good fit? Start backwards and it’ll make it easier to figure out what you should be looking for.
- What do you want to say to them? You probably need different variations of messaging depending on who you’re targeting — make it as personal and as specific to the reader as possible.
- How are you going to communicate your sales message? It helps to incorporate touch points across different mediums.
How to Determine the Best Prospecting Method
There are literally dozens of ways to prospect and find customers, but some are significantly more painful than others.
In order to determine which approach you should take, think about what you want your outcomes to look like — for instance, how many demos do you need to meet your sales goals, and how many prospects do you need at the top of the funnel to achieve that?
In most instances, it probably makes sense to use a sales prospecting tool like RevBoss.
We dove more into the topic of buying vs. building your own prospecting lists in this post.
Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment
If you’re looking for more customers quickly, try several prospecting methods and see what works best for you. Use social platforms like LinkedIn to run manual tests against a prospecting tool like RevBoss.
See what works for you and be open-minded, and you’re well on your way to finding your next customer!