11 Proven Sales Prospecting Techniques to Double Your Revenue

In the sales process, sales prospecting is one of the most important and most challenging stages. Prospecting requires a lot of hard work.  However, prospecting assures that each lead generated for the cold calls will suit your product or service well. 

During the sales prospecting stage, your business will be building more new leads through online research, inbound marketing methodology,  social media channels, etc. As a result, your business will not know the ideal potential customer until the lead qualification process is completed. This lead qualification will save a huge amount of time for the sales reps to research the potential buyer and compose an ideal email context and a cold call. 

Mastering the sales prospecting techniques to boost your business sales. Today sales are evolving quickly, and the sales conversion is customer-centric. So the sales professionals have started to implement different techniques and approaches for prospecting. 

In the sales cycle, sales prospecting is the key, and it consumes most of the time and energy to get it right. Long hours are spent identifying the potential customer and crafting a compelling personalized sales pitch. This article will outline the 11 proven sales prospecting and key strategies to double your revenue. 

What is Sales Prospecting?

Sales prospecting is the process of scanning the lead list to find the right one that you can convert into a profitable customer. In other words, it is a method of identifying sales potential for your business. Usually, the sales team would spend most of their time with a set of sales questions to the prospects to qualify the leads through cold outreach. It involves different forms of outreaches such as cold calling, cold email, SMS message, social selling, and more.

The ultimate aim of sales prospecting is to enter the potential buyers inside your sales funnel and hope to make sales closer form your business. Therefore, a good prospecting technique is essential for better and higher sales closer. First, the product or service has to solve the prospect's pain point and current challenges. Then there would be changes of more sales conversion. 

The Difference Between Outbound Vs. Inbound Prospecting

The sales reps will undergo two different kinds of prospects inbound and outbound prospecting in the sales cycle. In this section, we shall look into the difference between both inbound and outbound prospecting. 

Outbound Prospecting: Outbound prospecting is a process of reaching leads who are not already interested in your product or business. In this process, sales reps perform independent searches to find the cold prospect through Google search, Linkedin, Twitter, and other platforms. 

Inbound Prospecting: In this process, the sales reps will reach out to the inbound lead who actively shows interest in your business or products. These are the warm prospects for your business. These prospects are the individuals who are your business website, blogs, subscribers,  social media channel followers, and more. When your business engages with these people, your brand can understand whether they fit the product.

Importance of Sales Prospecting

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The sales prospecting process will enable you to identify the good fit prospects for your business. This means identifying the leads who absolutely want your product or service to resolve their pain points and challenges.

Prospective more effective and among 10 in 7 buyers wants to hear from the salespeople on their early stage of buying process and are more likely to respond. In addition, the research says that 82% of the customers accept meeting with the salesperson on their first visit. 

The sales person who performs the prospecting activity is generating 3x more sales when compared to the salespeople who do lower prospecting or don't perform prospecting.

By asking open-ended questions with your potential prospects your business can identify or qualify prospects who are a good fit in the prospecting process. Once the prospecting process completes you can initiate the sales deals closer with the good-fit customers who can contribute to the long-term business with your brand. 

More Customers: When your business implements the right prospecting, you can attract more potential customers and convert them into your buyers. But, unfortunately, the sales professional loses 15-20% of their customer base each year due to gradual attrition. 

The complete customer base eventually erodes without prospecting. But, on the other hand, prospecting will increase customers, and the salesperson will be busy with the existing and new buyer pool. 

Boost your Revenue: If your business has more potential buyers, it automatically improves your revenue generation. Each new potential buyer improves the sales production of the business. Executing the prospecting strategy will help businesses to grow over time.

Qualifying prospects: Qualifying your customer is a part of prospecting.  With the help of basic open-ended questions, you can identify the potential buyers for your business.  You can also understand the level of need of each prospect, financial capabilities, interests, and more. Sales outreach to potential customers interested in your product/services will improve sales conversion and reduce your sales cycle time. 

Lead Vs. Prospect What’s The Difference?

These terms appear similar, and there is frequent misuse of the term "prospect" when people mean "lead” in the sales pipeline. However, based on the analysis of each is treated in marketing, it becomes apparent that they are used differently. Leads are the potential customers who've shown interest in your business through behaviors such as visiting the site,  subscribers, blog readers, or people who sign up for the free trial. 

Prospects are leads that are qualified and, therefore, align with your target audience and buyer personas. You can nurture a lead using marketing automation tactics to attract them further into becoming a prospect - someone with enough information to engage them on an individual level. A good prospect will ultimately become your best customer.

It's important to remember leads and prospects differ by their definition, but the ultimate aim is the same. The nurturing of the prospects and leads begins in the prospecting, and it will progress until the time of deal closer. 

The 5 Key Steps In Sales Prospecting Process

If your business is unsure where to begin your prospecting methods, we are here to help you with that. This section shall look into the sales prospecting tips that you can apply to increase your sales.

Step 1: Research

The first step in the prospecting process is identifying and outlining how your ideal prospect looks. It is more important to ensure your products are the right fits to your product or services. 

This step aims to develop an ideal customer profile (ICP). To discover ICP your business needs to adopt for account-based marketing tactics to identify the prospects data such as industry, the total number of employees, annual business revenue, locations, their current pain points, current customers, the technology they use, and more

The more vital step in prospecting is developing a clear outline of the ideal customer. It also helps the business find the potential prospects that are a good fit for the product or services you offer. 

Step 2: Identify the Business Key Decision-Maker

The next step in prospecting is to find the individuals in the company who have the power to purchase products or services. In other words, the key decision-makers are the potential prospects for the business. 

The generic reach-out will not work on your sales process. However, identifying the decision-makers will make your sales process ahead. Thanks to tools like LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator and Smatwriter AI Email generator, you can find a company’s key decision-maker, verify their email address, and reach out to the decision-makers with a valid email address and contact details. It reduces the hard bounces on email campaigns and improves your making campaigns open rates. 

You can easily search the target prospect details using the company name, Position,  etc. You can also perform bulk validation by uploading the CSV file. Instead of finding a single decision-maker, it is always good to find many decision-makers like Directors, VP Sales, Founder, etc. In enterprise sales or B2B sales on an average of  17 people are involved in the decision-making process. 

Step 3: Personalized Reach Out & Set up A Meeting

Whenever you reach out to your potential targets over emails, Linkedin and calls, the meeting has to show your prospects how your product/service is useful instead of selling to them. 

Make use of the personalized outreaches. Spend some time to learn about your target prospect. After performing research, providing values to your recipient will help the receiver to reply to your outreaches. Suppose you utilize other outreach platforms such as social media to create customized content with the Smartwriter tool.

You can also implement personalization even for sending bulk emails and messages. This subject line is the first thing that hooks the recipients. It is the deciding factor of your email where to be opened or not. Implement personalization in the subject line, and it will improve your open rates. Tailor-made content messages have interested the customer and have to move them to the desired state. 

Using B2B Cold Email Templates may be less time-consuming, but writing a short and targeted message will increase your response rate. After personalizing your reach effectively, ensure whom you will send and why you’re sending them an email. Your content has to explain why they need to read your email outreach. 

The final part is scheduling a demo or a sales meeting in person or on a video call. In the last part, your personalized email has to have a book meeting, and don't forget to do follow-up emails to the clients. 

Step 4: Educate Your Clients And Evaluate

After completing the discovery call, it's time to evaluate and qualify the leads and their requirements. Your product or service has to be a good fit for their business goal. The sales reps have to identify their business needs, offer value, and move further in the sales cycle. 

Step 5: Finally, Close Your Sales Deal

The final stage of sales prospecting is closing deals and getting contracts signed. Usually, before the sales closer, there would be some crucial stage every business to face on the sales closer are the sales objections. According to Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova, sales objections normally come under four major categories: budget, authority, need, and time (BANT).

Overcome the objections, offer your clients a trial period, outline the next steps with your targeted customer, and move the sales closer.

11 Simple Proven Sales Prospecting Strategies To Close Deals 

There are tons of sales prospecting techniques or sales prospecting strategies that are available on the market. Today, we will look into the top 11 proven sales prospecting methods to boost your sales performance and double your revenue. Feel free to experiment with each sales technique and identify the ideal one for your business. 

1. Understand Your Buyer’s Psychology

Knowing your consumer behavior and understanding your customer requirements from your business is the secret to generating more sales. Each organization has a prospecting rock star where you get to know the buyer's view. Understanding the pain and wants is a great way to know your client's view. 

Businesses need to research their consumer behavior. Implementing the storytelling. The stories will motivate buyers, advocates in the decision-making process. It helps to drive the potential customer easily to the sale. Utilizing social proof improves your business credibility. The prospects no longer listen to us, but they listen to what their peers say about your business. Use social proof in your email prospecting for better sales conversion. 

2. Identify Your Business Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Once you get to know your buyer's psychology, the only question that matters with your prospecting email is: what’s in it for me? Communicate your product or service better than the competitor in a unique way: “What’s in it for me?” Therefore, you should focus your prospecting emails on delivering this message.

The unique selling position outlines how your business product or service is different from the market competition. And give a brief description of why your target customer wants to choose your business over the competition. The USP is the most important tool in effective prospecting emails. If you are working for the business for a longer time, you are probably good at your business USP, and while communicating with your potential client, focus on the USP instead of more sales conversation. 

3. Design A Perfect Prospect Profile

Take some time and identify what your business ideal customer profile looks like, and then begin your search on your sales database. By doing this, you can obtain the top customer and the irrelevant customers on your email list. This will help you to reduce your hard bounce and can reach the most profitable customers.

Your business can group the least profitable and profitable customer lists. However, it doesn't mean your sales database has your ideal customer profile. According to recent research, nearly half of the prospects are 50% of the database non-fit customers. So doing homework to find both profitable and less profitable customers is more important. These tactics are known as account-based sales. 

4. Proactively Work On Your Calling Lists

If your business has a cold call list and warm lead list, it takes some time to prioritize leads and reach the people on your list each day. However, research shows In a year nearly 69% of customers accept the call from salespeople. On the other hand, 27% of sellers agree that sales calls effectively connect with the new leads. 

Another sale prospecting tip is listing down open-ended questions to each prospect to qualify the leads and find the potential buyers. Asking among 11 - 14 questions with the leads over a cold calling will get your business 74% greater success. 

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Making interesting conversations will make qualifying leads easier. Then, consistently work on the real-time prospect list and finalize the profitable leads.  

5. Send Personalized Sales Email

Many marketers think this email as a sales tool is not effective today. But the Rain Group research. says that 80% of the buyers prefer to connect with the sellers through emails. So still, emails are the most effective method to get connected with your business potential buyers. 

Personalization on the emails will increase a 26% higher open rate on either mass or bulk emails.  Before outreach, ensure your content is personalized for each potential prospect. So make sure you are using appropriate content for the prospect. You can easily achieve this with the help Smartwriter tool, the features of LinkedIn personalisation, personalised icebreakers, help your business to generate high converting LinkedIn prospecting messages & prospecting email messages. 

Personalization on prospecting will improve the open and make the prospects read your email. Make sure the email messages are optimized for mobile devices. The facts say that more than 50% of the emails are opened on mobile devices, and optimization will improve 15% higher click-through rates. Here are the b2b cold email templates to increase response rates!

6. Ask for referrals

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Sales referrals help to bridge the trust gap between your business and the prospect. Nielsen’s study says that 92% of people trust the referrals from someone they know.

The referral will leverage the goodwill between the referred customer and your business. Referral to the prospecting will improve your business's credibility. Having a referral on the prospecting makes the purchase process faster. 

Happy customers always speak happy words about the brand. Nearly 91% of B2B buyers are inspired by word-of-mouth marketing and make their purchasing decision. In addition, referral-based sales help to close to nearly 50%-70% of your business sales. 

7. Instead of Trying to Sell Educate Your Prospects

While performing cold calling or prospecting, email doesn't sound like a sale. So instead, make your communication to help your prospect's challenges and pain points through product or services. 

Educating the ideal customer with the problem with the potential solution will create clients to try. Ensure you are outreaching them with content that addresses their particular pain points. 

The content can be in various forms, such as blog posts, white papers, ebooks, and more, but it has to attract and engage your prospects. Educating your clients will support achieving your sales goal and give sales closer with them an excellent chance.

8. Take advantage of Marketing and Sales Automation Tools

The marketing automation and sales automation tool will be the game-changer in your sales prospecting. Your business can do all your sales prospecting processes manually in today's competitive market. Automation tools will accelerate your lead qualification efforts and outreach process.

Speed up your lead qualification process by using these incredibly useful tools like LinkedIn,  Datanyze, Crunchbase, AngelList, Datafox, Smartwriter, YesWare, Autoklose. and more at the various stages of your sales prospecting journey. So take advantage of sales automation solutions and speed up your lead nurturing, email campaigns, cold callings, and more in your sales cycle. 

9. Utilize Video Contents 

Video content has been rising in popularity in both sales and marketing in recent years. Nearly 70% of the b2b buyers watch one or more videos during their buying journey. Moreover, 60% of people prefer YouTube, Vimeo, and more video-sharing platforms, as well as Enterprise video platforms, to learn about your products or services before purchasing.

Your video content can be of any kind. Try to create educational videos on a specific topic relevant to your targeted audience, personalize the video, address your potential customer, including their pain points, and offer your potential solution for the challenges. Create a corporate video showcasing your company's values and expertise, demonstrating how your product or service can solve their problems.

10. Remember to Implement Email Follow-Ups

Have a follow-up email with your potential customers instead of giving up on the sales process after your first try. Offer additional value on each follow-up with the clients.

A follow-up email can be related to the industry, the latest trending topics on the industry niche, pain points. You can share it in any form, such as newsletters, blog posts, ebooks, white papers, case study and more. 

It doesn't require the follow-up to be in the same way as initial outreach. For example, you can perform follow-ups on social media messaging on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, callings, etc.  Reaching the potential client on a multi-channel will increase the chance of getting attention and replies. 

11. Employ Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is the most reliable way to begin real-time communications with potential leads. With this marketing technique, you can build an automated 24/7 method to generate more prospects. When it comes to conversational marketing, the Chatbot is the key comment for a solid conversational marketing strategy.

Effective chatbots will communicate with your inbound lead more efficiently like a human. Inbound lead qualification can easily be performed using bots. The bots also perform the sales rep's operations by asking the potential customer the same question set that salespeople ask on emails or phone call

s and qualify the prospects. Using artificial intelligence (AI) prospecting tools will help your business to find & connect with more prospects. 

The best example of qualifying leads like a human is by a conversational approach using Drift software. It is a sales prospecting tool that acts as a revenue acceleration platform, and it offers a personalized experience to the customer in real-time. Adapting the conversational strategy of your business can improve your prospecting effort, increase revenue and strengthen the brands. In addition, the sales prospecting tool helps to shorten your sales cycle.

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Conclusion 

Sales Prospecting is not a complex and tedious process. Instead, it offers a positive experience for both the sales team and the potential clients. Prospecting makes sales easier. From the above, Modern sales prospecting methods your business can adopt and experience with different strategies and identify the best fit for your business sales. 

Find the best sales prospecting technique and tools that suit your business and start converting more buyers in no time.  With the above best sales prospecting techniques and the tools, your business can identify the revenue-generating customer and get the best out of your marketing team & sales. So start to find a good fit prospect today and improve your sales.