Effective sales prospecting process guide to build high-quality leads
What is sales prospecting?
Sales prospecting is a process in which sales and business development representatives build a list of potential buyers or targeted prospects and reach out to them through cold calls or emails.
Why is sales prospecting important?
Sales prospecting is an important step in the sales process that helps you build a pipeline of high quality prospects that match your ideal customer profile.
Sales Representatives often find manual prospecting very troublesome and time-consuming. It is impossible for sales & business representatives to administrate separate times for prospecting unless the process is really quick and effective. In order to save time, effort and not to have any effect on their sales, they must speed up their prospecting by automating it.
If a B2B lead generation tool automates all the hard work + manual research and can get you targeted prospects along with their business emails as well as phone numbers, wouldn’t that be great?
LeadGrabber Pro is a sales prospecting tool that helps you speed up prospecting, generate potential sales leads and increase your sales conversion.
The sales prospecting process:
Now that we have our targeted set of prospects, we need to typically go through the following phases regardless of how the sale pipeline looks like.
1. Lead Qualification
Effective prospecting begins with researching our pre-determined prospects. Lead qualification is a process in which we rank our prospects and determine which leads will engage, in order of priority.
Our goal during this phase is to determine the quality of the prospect. We’ll do this by evaluating the prospect using both direct and indirect data and keep track of our findings even in the later stages through a CRM.
Direct or explicit data: This includes data about or by the prospect. Example: Company name, industry, title, and location.
Indirect data or implicit data: This is often derived from monitoring a prospect’s behavior such as visits, downloads, opens, and clicks.
Lead qualification not only allows a business to customize a prospect’s buying experience but greatly improves the willingness or readiness of leads that are delivered to the sales teams for follow-up.
2. Reaching Decision-Makers
Once we’ve qualified the prospect, we will have to reach out to someone at the company. Or, if we already have a person whom we’d like to reach out to, we’ll reach out to them directly through an email channel.
You might think that connecting & reaching decision-makers is a cakewalk. But that’s not the reality. There are some challenges that you might encounter to reach decision-makers.
- Decision-makers do not accept all connection requests unless they know you or it is relevant to them or their business.
- Generally, decision-makers use their personal email address to sign up for LinkedIn. Since they are always busy, they don’t check personal emails or LinkedIn messages every day; maybe they do it on weekends.
- In certain industries, decision-makers, though they are on LinkedIn, they are not active on LinkedIn. They do not check LinkedIn messages at all. They use email & phone as their primary channels of communication
But, one of the biggest revelations is that decision-makers respond instantly to their business emails than personal emails. Therefore, it is essential to build a robust email channel to reach decision-makers.
3. The Product Demo
Your sales reps can write down their observations during the demo in this phase. Examples include
Buying signals: Pricing plan or solution they liked. Did the prospect talk about the next steps? Which feature excited them the most? Who in the company will be using your products and why? These questions also help you redefine your target market as well. Ask for and write the exact words for these questions.
Budget: Ask about their approximate budget and their buying steps.
Discounts: Note down the discounts and SKUs discussed.
Objections: Discuss the things that you should try to address if possible.
Note down 3+ discovery and remember points. These points to remember can be used to advance the sale – deadline.
4. Demo summary
In this phase, sales reps will summarize the demo on the likelihood to buy and the lead match.
Come up with a lead score with person & company details, lead target, and buying time frame. Add to a score of 100 or 200.
The buying time frame can be categorized into <30 days and 30-60 days.
Also note down your next steps in the selling process.
For example: Sending the slide deck/presentation, samples (if any), the next follow-up date with the prospect.
5. Closing a Deal
Now we have arrived at a whole bunch of information we need. We know the prospect’s challenges, pain points, and possible objections to purchasing the product. This is the time to turn your prospects into customers. You will probably end up closing a sale if you concentrate more on the value that your product/service will add to their business.
When each step of the sales prospecting process is taken up with utmost importance and followed up religiously by the sales representatives, the closing ratio will automatically spike up thereby increasing your ROI.
