B2B prospecting is a great way for teams to grow their business. Prospecting is a big part of what people think the typical salesperson does. It involves emailing, calling and doing anything you can to reach a potential customer and create a connection with them. Oftentimes, these efforts are done on a mass scale, making it easy for teams to get tripped up in making sure they’re prospecting in the most effective way. Here’s some of our tips on how to ensure you’re B2B prospecting the best you can.
Why is Sales Prospecting Important?
To start, let’s talk about why sales prospecting is so important. Effective prospecting helps grow your pipeline. While there are situations of inbound leads coming in, or lead generation of another form, outbound prospecting is a main driver of pipeline growth. When prospecting effectively, your team is able to reach out to thousands of ideal customers every day. While it may seem like a lot of work, there’s ways to make this the easiest thing to cross off your to-do list.
B2B Prospecting Methods
There are many different ways to prospect effectively. The main two are the ones that non-salespeople probably think of, emails and phone calls. Email blasts and cold calls are stereotypical selling activities, but that’s because they can work effectively with the right strategy and processes in place. All those emails you get each day about solving pain points and new product features are all prospecting emails.
Digging deeper into emailing and phone calls, here’s a list of some specific examples we’d recommend to help stand out amongst the crowd:
- Keep your email subject lines short, ideally between 2 and 5 words
- Use email scoring from your sales engagement platform to help prioritize prospects
- Use call scripts across your team to ensure best practices are followed
- Leverage reporting to show the best times of day to reach your audience
- Always include a call to action in your emails
There’s also other types of prospecting, even if they may not appear to be at first glance. Things such as social media messages and direct mail can also be considered prospecting. So, it’s important to remember to leverage more than one channel. It’s never a bad thing when a prospect sees your name in more than one area.
How to Find B2B Prospects
Now, you know that it’s important to reach your prospects and know there’s many ways to do this. However, the next step is finding the prospects. First, you have to define your target persona. Who is buying your product or service, and who do you want to reach? The reason answering these questions is so important connects back to the different prospecting methods. If you’re trying to reach retirees, you probably don’t want to rely on social media to connect with them.
Once you know who your target audience is, it’s time to find who’s a part of that group. This is where data intelligence tools come in handy. These tools help with B2B lead generation and we’ll talk more about those later in the blog.
B2B Prospecting Tools
In order to be the best B2B prospector, you’re going to need the best B2B prospecting tools. It would be impossible to find enough people, figure out how to reach them, and make all your touches with them without the help of different tools. Below are a few of our picks for tools that will help you prospect better than you could’ve imagined.
SalesIntel/ZoomInfo/Seamless.AI
These tools are all data intelligence tools. Essentially, they help you find verified contacts to reach out to. While it may seem like a huge feat to find enough people to reach out to, these tools can provide tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of contacts in your ideal audience to reach out to. These teams take the manual work out of making sure the people you reach out to are real and the right personas. With SalesIntel, ZoomInfo and Seamless.AI, it’s as easy as searching for the group you want to target, then syncing these contacts into Salesforce or another CRM, and then enrolling them into a cadence to start contacting them.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
For sellers that want to get a little more personalized, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great option. It’s used to help bring up a prospect’s LinkedIn information, allowing the seller to make a more meaningful connection with the prospect. Sometimes, including a tidbit about where someone went to college or highlighting a shared connection can make the difference in whether a prospect responds or not.
Lavender
It seems like everyone is being nailed with dozens if not hundreds of emails a day. You must stand out amongst the crowd. For teams that utilize outbound emailing in their prospecting efforts, it’s essential to make sure people are actually reading your emails. Lavender is an email coaching tool that helps you write the best content. It uses AI to help highlight potential issues with your email content, allowing you to change them and ensure you’re following best practices.
Salesvue
Salesvue is the tool that helps tie these all together. Salesvue is a sales engagement platform that lives natively within Salesforce. It has all the functionality and features that major, well-known SEP tools have, except within Salesforce. So, you can complete your sales cycle within a single platform, Salesforce, rather than having to bounce back and forth between tabs. For example, you can send hundreds of emails with the click of a button, giving you more time to focus on high-value tasks and still prospect.
This connects with the rest of the B2B prospecting tools because it helps align them under a single roof. Since Salesvue lives in Salesforce, any application that can live within Salesforce can also be used within Salesvue. Rather than having your SEP open on one page, and your Salesforce and other applications open on another, bring them all together.
Summary
B2B prospecting is essential in today’s environment. There’s lots of people who either don’t have the time for an hour-long demo the first time you connect with them, and there’s even more who aren’t interested in that. Effectively prospecting can not only help grow your brand recognition but can help grow your pipeline as well. By remembering all the pieces that fall under prospecting and using all the tools available to help you, the sky's the limit in your B2B prospecting efforts!
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