Sales Prospecting Workflow: Tips, Techniques, & Tools to Succeed

To efficiently sell your product or service, you should master the art of sales prospecting. You should conduct systematic training for your sales rep team to let them know the best sales prospecting methods, techniques, and practices of the sphere. Hopefully, this article will help you better understand the specifics of the sales prospecting process to channel marketing efforts effectively. 

What Is Sales Prospecting?

The essence of the sales prospecting process consists of detecting potential customers who would be interested in purchasing your product or service and communicating with them throughout the sales cycle. The ultimate mission of the dialogue is to move them further into the buying process, convince sales prospects to order your product and transfer funds to you. To achieve this goal, sales professionals should target their prospecting efforts at people with relevant tastes, needs, and buying opportunities.

There is a difference between the definition of sales lead and sales prospect. Qualified leads are individuals who appreciate your product — and potential prospects are someone who can afford to order it.

For instance, a teenager is interested in sports cars that you manufacture. He follows you on social media platforms and shares photos of the vehicles — but he will be able to buy one of your autos in ten years, at best. Such personnel are qualified leads. An entrepreneur who also likes your cars but earns enough to purchase one and has already talked to your sales reps is a prospect.

Inbound and Outbound Sales Prospecting

There are 2 main approaches to the sales prospecting process. An outbound prospecting strategy implies actively reaching out to prospects with a sales pitch to promote the services directly. Inbound sales prospecting focuses on creating advertising and promotion content that leads customers to your website and social media pages and makes them reach out themselves.

Inbound marketing is a usual choice for lead generation, yet sales prospecting tends to choose outbound prospecting. However, both of these can have a positive impact on sales productivity and can be used to create leads.

Outbound Prospecting

Outbound sales prospecting includes the following:

Cold calling

It is one of the oldest tactics used in the sales process. It implements unsolicited calling to a potential prospect and trying to sell a product or service.

Cold emailing

It implements unsolicited emailing to a potential prospect and trying to sell a product or service or pitching a potential sale so they could contact you themselves. Such a tactic is widely used as a part of general email marketing comparison and can have numerous purposes.

Social media prospecting

Social media prospecting is focused on reaching out to potential prospects with the help of social media. Usually, it is part of the general social media marketing campaign.

People tend to share life updates on social media. Sales reps use available information to locate the prospects and start a personal conversation.

Inbound Prospecting

Inbound sales prospecting includes the following tactics:

Warm emailing

This process involves sending emails to prospects who frequently interact with your promotional and business channels. Based on your knowledge about the level of interest, you can either send a direct link to the sales page or provide some additional advice first.

Social selling

This selling process includes contacting a prospect who interacts with your social media. Usually, a business sends a response after a subscription, which acts as a more financial interest confirmation. You can start a conversation on any platform, whether it's LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook.

How to Prospect to Potential Buyers

If you want to improve your prospecting outreach and better comprehend how sales professionals are doing their job, we have prepared a list of the prose. There will be an aid to help you get a thorough understanding of each prospect's business needs.

Dedicate time to sales prospecting

You shouldn't do it occasionally, whenever you have a spare minute. Instead, you should plan your sessions and let your sales team know that you're busy at this time. Make sure your prospects are available during these intervals and eager to talk to you.

Rely on your network

Don't hesitate to ask for referrals from your existing customers — they might considerably increase your conversion rate.

Listen to people's needs

Many of your potential customers might be turned off by conventional sales prospecting techniques. But they would be glad if you could listen to their pains and offer solutions to them.

Make the most of events

At any live event, you will find dozens or hundreds of people who share similar interests and can become qualifying leads. Detect the ones with the highest proportion of prospects, decide which sessions and network meetups you would like to attend, and find a reason for visiting the event.

Choose whether you would like to come there as a speaker or guest. Find ways of standing out from the crowd and star building your sales funnel.

Help people on Q&A forums

There, you should avoid direct sales prospecting methods. Instead, you should answer people's questions and prove that you have impressive expertise in your sphere.

You shouldn't promote your product or service directly. It would be enough to place your company's logo on your avatar and briefly speak about yourself in your profile description.

Best Sales Prospecting Tips

High-performing sales prospecting experts tend to stick to the number rules when building the sales process. We have prepared a list of sales prospecting tips that can help you build the sales funnel to reach the target audience.

Inspect career pages of your potential buyers

Detect departments that are growing and hiring — this should help you guess about the company's pain points, key challenges and goals to give the best sales pitch. Check the annual financial reports of public companies to find the correlation between your product or service offering and their stated business challenges and make a value proposition.

Use ratings to categorize your top target accounts

A sales prospect with a high rating fully matches your criteria for the buyer persona, can connect with a decision-maker, and frequently interacts with you through the website or social media channels. You have common interests or mutual connections with them, and your products can satisfy their pains.

Prospects with a medium rating match only a few of your criteria for customer persona, and they can connect with an influencer and interact with you online from time to time.

The ones with a low rating have unclear business challenges and would fail to connect with influencers or decision-makers. They hardly match with your customer persona and rarely interact with you on the Internet. The higher the rating of the prospect, the more often you should get in touch with them.

Read, watch and listen to your prospects' blogs

It should be enough to skim the most important posts to maintain highly personalized communication with people whom you're prospecting and better understand their needs.

Batch prospecting sessions

Set timers to control the duration of each call. Let each session last two-three hours. Let your sales teams take a five-minute break after each sales call.

Give yourself five more minutes for the follow-up, five minutes for updating your notes on the prospect, and five minutes for preparing for the next call.

Follow up after closed-lost deals

Imagine that you put a lot of time and effort into prospecting — but got a negative response from your potential client. You shouldn't try to make them change your mind.

However, it would be wise to send them a short follow-up email, asking why they said "no". You can directly ask the prospect:

"Did I do something wrong?"

or

"Did you dislike anything that I said?"

Collect the responses and classify your prospects according to their willingness to resume the conversation sometime later and improve the sales process.

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Cold Emailing and Cold Calling

Now, let's focus on the importance of phone calls and emails for sales prospecting as a part of the communication with the potential customer. Both types of communication can deliver excellent results, and your sales teams should alternate between them when talking to each person.

Direct Mail

Emails are a visual part of the sales cycle, and your potential customers can open them when they have time. After the recipient reads your message, they have time to search for additional information about your business and products.

This makes them better prepared for your upcoming dialogs and sales meetings. People can easily forward your emails to decision-makers and stakeholders.

On the flip side, prospects will be likely to forget emails quicker than calls. They might occasionally delete your messages.

You'll need to compete for the recipient's attention against dozens of other emails that they get every day. You might need to follow up with the potential customers many times before they reply.

Cold Calls

As for the cold calling sales strategy, some sales prospecting experts might say that they have become obsolete and that you should discard them completely because it's impolite to take away people's precious time. It's true that the ratio of voice calls in modern communication processes is shrinking, especially if we mean cold calling.

But some prospects don't mind talking to sales reps over the phone. You might grab their attention from the first second, and they might be more eager to make impulsive purchases if you use this communication channel.

The trickiest aspect of calling is to detect the optimal time when the client can pick up the phone. If they are currently busy, you might prefer to call them back later rather than leave a voicemail — there might be too many messages there, and the recipient might feel a bit too lazy or tired to call you back and learn about some new business.

Sales prospecting strategy for cold calling

When calling a prospect, you might want to stick to the following sales process scheme:

Build rapport.

Feel free to ask the client how their weekend was or ask some other personal questions. That should help you set a friendly tone for your conversation and increase your odds of getting a positive reply to your offer.

Leverage pain points.

Before calling sales prospects, you should do some research to get to know their needs and preferences. During the conversation, you should get to know more details about your prospect's pains to use the correct sales triggers.

Make the potential customer feel curious.

The best trick to gaining successful customers would be to ask more than tell. The person should tell you everything about themselves — but the less they know about you, the better. They should realize who you are and which industry you belong to — but you shouldn't focus on your competitive edges yet.

Schedule a meeting within the next two days.

Ask the client whether they would like to see you. Let them know that some colleague of yours is an expert in the field and can help them fix their pain points.

It might seem weird that you don't talk about your product at all during a warm call. But this method has proved its efficiency, and you can safely rely on it.

Contacting potential customers via Email

Here is an optimal structure of a high-quality warm email that can serve as your first touchpoint in a sales cycle with the prospect:

• Engaging subject line. It should be informative and sound a bit unusual.

• Personal opening line. Start talking about the recipient and not about yourself. Let the client understand that you know who they are and what they might need.

• Establish a connection. Try to explain to the client why they might be interested in your business and products.

• Call-to-action. For instance, you may ask the recipient whether they will have fifteen minutes to talk to you at a certain time tomorrow.

Instead of an email, you might try sending a calendar invite. Your sales team will be able to add a short personalized message in the description section.

The Best Sales Prospecting Tools

The sales prospecting process involves a lot of actions and channels that can be very hard to monitor. The best tool should be available for both the sales team and the marketing department to help you find the right prospects and create effective prospecting strategies.

Bitrix24 - one of the best sales prospecting tools

This software features very diverse functionality:

Cloud-based storage

It can store a database with an unlimited number of contacts for lead generation and sales prospecting, offers excellent document and task management tools, and smoothly integrates with third-party solutions, such as DropBox or Google Drive.

Communicate with your target audience

Each time you interact with a prospect, Bitrix24 will automatically save all the details of your communication. You'll be able to call your clients and send them emails, as well as do research and profound analytics to qualify leads right from the product's CRM.

Thanks to the Bitrix24 omnichannel contact center, you can search for new potential customers on social media networks, landing pages, web forms and many other sources. This will help you establish social selling without the need for additional software.

Team Collaboration

By the way, this system is perfect for internal communications as well. You can discuss your workflows with your team using the built-in tools that include chats, calls, and videoconferencing. Calendars and notifications will keep your staff informed about important updates.

Bitrix24 is indispensable for email- and telemarketing. It allows you to sort your customers and products by parameters and distribute access rights among your sales reps.

Analytics to streamline your prospecting efforts

The system can generate insightful reports that you can turn into actionable knowledge. You can either use ready-made report templates or create custom ones.

You'll be able to analyze activity and sales by agent, leads by stages, sales funnels and channels and many other metrics. The system will let you access quotes and invoices in print, email or PDF formats.

User-friendly interface

At first sight, Bitrix24 might seem like a rather complex solution. But its interface is highly intuitive and your staff should get quickly accustomed to it.

You'll appreciate the well-structured knowledge database of Bitrix24 and its informative YouTube videos. The team of the product will be glad to conduct trainings for you and support managers will be ready to attend to you at any moment when you might have a question.

HubSpot

It enables you to source new prospects and keep track of sales activities. The HubSpot CRM can automatically log all the actions of your salespeople, manage your sales pipeline and store your contact database in a well-structured format.

Right through the CRM, you can detect warm prospects who have already visited your site. Using the dedicated prospects tool, you can monitor all visits to your site in real-time and then follow-up with them. You'll be able to send personalized email sequences to your clients and estimate the efficiency of your email templates right in the CRM.

Plus, HubSpot allows you to customize email notifications for your staffers. They can sort prospects by parameters and get regular notifications about the high-priority clients.

Kixie

This solution employs AI. It features a full-voice and SMS enterprise phone platform where you can create a virtual receptionist. Kixie can transfer calls and help you with voicemails. If necessary, you can integrate it with third-party software.

SalesHandy

Feel free to use it to schedule outreach emails and automate your lead nurturing sequence. SalesHandy is very efficient at following up with individuals who failed to respond to your initial emails or neglected them at all.

You'll get to know how quickly and how often people check your emails — and you'll be able to use this information to improve your prospecting.

SalesHub

In-built tracking tools will let you see whether your clients open your emails, follow the links you offer them and check attached files. Plus, you'll be aware of when exactly they do that. You can conveniently schedule your emails so that the recipients will be eager to read them.

Sometimes, a person might open the message that you sent to them a while ago. In this case, SalesHub will enable you to follow up with information that is relevant to the facts that they learned from your old email.

Linkedin Sales Navigator

With millions of users, LinkedIn is one of the most popular platforms for sales prospecting. The network of professional profiles can help a sales manager locate the right prospects who can become loyal customers.

LinkedIn sales navigator can be a helpful tool to create targeted prospecting strategies. Features like advanced search, filters, and profile updates will be useful in locating potential customers.

Sales Prospecting Process

Sales prospecting consists of the following steps:

1. Research your prospects, their needs and values. Strive to establish rapport with them by personalizing your communication.

2. Prioritize your prospects based on how likely they are to purchase your products. Target most of your efforts at those who might be ready to pay immediately.

3. Compile a pitch for each prospect. Check your prospects' sites, blogs and social media accounts to get to know what they are currently busy with. Try to identify connection points, such as trigger events, mutual contacts or the fact that they have visited your websites and searched for something there. Draft a decision map to understand the prospect's goals. Think of how you could position your goods to overcome the prospect's objection.

4. When getting in touch with the person for the first time, avoid trying to sell anything to them — instead, offer them your help. Offer a solution to a problem that the prospect has (you need to make sure in advance that this issue is still relevant to them). Show some human emotions and add a personal touch to your dialogue. Ask nothing in return for the value that you provide.

5. Strive to stay natural and casual at all the stages of prospecting. Avoid turning into a sales robot — instead, you should establish a friendly relationship with your prospect.

6. Keep notes during the conversation to understand which phrases and ideas strike a chord with your interlocutor.

Once the sales prospecting session is over, you should devote some time to self-reflection. Which challenges have you uncovered? Did the conversation enable you to set well-defined goals? Have the prospect confirmed that they have the budget available? How enthusiastic is the customer about your products? These questions should help you draft your next prospecting sessions.

A prospect is a person who needs your goods or services and can afford to order them. All you need to do is to motivate them for the purchase.

People rarely appreciate straightforward sales prospecting techniques — so instead of trying to sell something, you should listen to your clients' stories about their problems and offer solutions for them. You should rely on the combination of phone calls and emails, batch your sales prospecting sessions and use software that helps you automate processes, such as Bitrix24.