Picture the following: You are in the middle of a new hiring initiative. You need a rockstar team of sales reps who will bring your business the success you have been aiming for all these years.
Scenario one: You have a jam-packed schedule. You are in charge of hiring the new sales reps before you hand them off to your sales manager to onboard them. You grab your coffee, a pen, and a pencil and call in your first candidate.
You start to interview them, but you have your first sip of coffee. Wow. That is good coffee. What was your interviewee saying? Whatever. What time is it? Some minutes pass and the clock and super delicious coffee keep distracting you.
Scenario two: Things look a little different. You reviewed your first candidate’s resume and researched them on LinkedIn. You are thoroughly prepared to interview them. You know going into the interview their basic skills. You have the questions laid out to ask them, according to their professional networking profile and experience per their resume.
You are an active listener during the interview and you know this candidate is the right fit.
In the first instance, you went in blind. You couldn’t have cared less. In the second, you qualified your potential new sales rep. In essence, you were using prospecting methods to qualify them.
Are you doing the same for your lead prospecting during the lead generation process? For your prospecting in sales?
Let’s talk about the sales prospecting tips so you know how to prospect effectively every time.
What Makes Sales Prospecting Successful?
Later on, we will go over the top sales prospecting tips so you can close more sales. But like everything else in your business world, there are many layers to those sales prospecting tips.
To be successful in prospecting and prospecting marketing, you have to start at the beginning.
You want to start out with the AIDA formula. It is an acronym that stands for:
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
You need to generate attention toward your brand. And you can do this by sparking interest in what you have to offer. Each of those stages in AIDA brings your sales prospects closer to the final A, or to taking “Action” and buying.
Once you have your strategy in place with AIDA, you need to maximize your and your team’s time. This means you want to appeal to those who already have an interest in your brand, its products, and its services.
To do that, here are six sales prospecting tips to take advantage of straightaway:
- Target the right audience through thorough research
- Show, don’t just tell, how you can provide value with what you sell
- Carefully craft offers that will land
- Avoid tricks and misleading tactics
- Collaborate with your team on how many and what kind of approaches you will use to appeal to your prospects
What is the Only Thing You Control in Prospecting?
What is the Only Thing You Control in Prospecting?Does it ever feel like the way you go about your business prospecting is not working for you? Maybe your sales prospecting process is out of your control?
Sometimes, things go wrong and unexpected circumstances pop up. You have to care, obviously, but you also have to come to terms with the fact that you cannot always change everything. At least, not all the time.
You will find yourself with a much lighter burden weighing you down if you accept that. But there still is one thing you can control in prospecting.
Here’s another one of our sales prospecting tips:
You can only control your active prospecting activities. When you cold call for your outbound prospecting efforts, you decide:
- Who you call
- How often do you call and at what time
- What you say in the call
Advertising, on the other hand, is a passive prospecting technique. You can put out the content, but you cannot control whether your prospects read it or engage with it.
Mix up both passive and active prospecting techniques. You will find that you close more sales, more often.
6 Sales Prospecting Tips to Better Qualify Prospects and Win More Deals
We went over some of your basic, entry-level sales prospecting tips. But here are our top six sales prospecting tips to follow. If you do, you will find that you end up with better-quality prospects and a more streamlined qualification process.
And the most exciting part is that these prospecting tips will help you to win more deals for more cash flow, right into your business.
Take a Look at Your Prospect’s Key Goals and/or Challenges
What job board can you find your prospects spending time on? From that board (or those boards, plural), where do they seem to need the most help? What areas do they want to invest in for their success? Where are they thriving?
If you are trying to sell to a prospect that is part of a larger public company, there’s another little hack you can try out here.
From the board, navigate to their “Risk Factors” section. Check out their 10-K, or annual financial report document. And from there, you can find out their professional challenges with solid data. See if what you offer can help them overcome those challenges and go from there.
Use GPCTBA/C&I for Your Targeted Prospect List
Sales prospecting tools and sales qualification frameworks are everywhere. We mean it: Everywhere. So we get that it can be tough to figure out which one you should apply to your own sales qualification process.
We love Hubspot’s GPCTBA/C&I framework. Here’s what the acronym stands for:
- GPCT – Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline
- BA – Budget and Authority
- C&I – Negative Consequences and Positive Implications
To apply this to your own business, determine your prospects’ specific goals and their plans to achieve those goals. What are their challenges, and what is their timeline to buy so they can hurdle over those challenges?
Then, figure out their budget so you can know if they are even able to close a sale with you. Are you talking to the right person? You need to talk to the decision-makers within your prospects’ company who have the authority to close the sale.
Last of all, understand the outcome if your prospect reaches or fails to reach their goal(s).
Rate Your Prospects to Qualify Them
You need to assign a sort of numerical value to your prospects to qualify them. In simpler terms, how likely they are to turn into paying customers on a scale of high, medium, or low.
High ratings mean that they:
- Line up with your ideal buyer persona
- Have a specific professional obstacle that you can directly solve with your product or service
- Let you talk to a key decision-maker
- Share interests or contacts with you/your business
- Engage with your brand a lot
Medium means that they:
- Line up with part(s) of your ideal buyer persona
- Have a specific professional obstacle that you can directly solve with your product or service
- Let you talk to an influencer
- Engage with your brand a little
Low means that they:
- Do not line up with your ideal buyer persona
- Have a non-specific obstacle that you do not know much about
- Do not have a decision-maker or influencer you can talk to
- Have little to no engagement with your brand
Subscribe to Relevant Blogs to Search for Your Prospects’ Pain Points and Valuable Information
Read through your prospects’ blogs.
First, pick blog posts that catch your eye and open each of them in a new tab. Briefly read through them to get the gist and find the most important information, like your prospects’ pain points.
Imagine the picture they are painting from their perspective.
Then, you can customize your approach to them when you cold call or cold email to their experiences and content.
Be Creative With Your Emails and Cold Calls
Be Creative With Your Emails and Cold CallsThere are so many sales prospecting tips for cold calling and emailing. Some might say there are too many. (Surprise! We, too, think there are too many.)
So you need a creative approach to stand out to your prospects and move them down your funnel. Buyers have seen it all before, and they don’t want standardized outreach efforts. Nor do you want to bore yourself with the same-old techniques.
Think about breaking up the time you spend on each email and call with a timer to refresh your mind and approach.
Also, weigh the pros and cons of both cold calling and emailing. Personalize your messages according to whom you are targeting.
Always Follow Up, Even After a Rejected Deal
“Rejected right now” does not mean “rejected forever.” A lot of the time, a prospect who does not want to buy from your business simply does not have room in their budget this quarter or time to make a change.
Also, you should follow up after a rejected deal to see why a prospect rejected you. This will help you to understand what you can do differently the next time around, or for the next prospect.
Conclusion
To say the very least, it’s valuable to have a resource for sales prospecting tips and other professional advice, isn’t it?
You can find more of them on our blog and featured media page.
But wouldn’t it be even better to see successful prospecting happen for you in real-time? Wouldn’t it be a relief to watch your business revel in the glory of better leads more often? To revel in the glory of higher-quality sales training and more top talent that will better serve your business?
You can, when you come to Selling Revolution to level up your selling system.
There’s no time to waste.