What is a method of prospecting in which salespeople telephone or go to see potential customers without appointments?
What is Prospecting?Prospecting is the first step in the sales process, which consists of identifying potential customers, aka prospects. The goal of prospecting is to develop a database of likely customers and then systematically communicate with them in the hopes of converting them from potential customer to current customer. Show
Historical ReferenceThe original use of the term “prospector” refers to the efforts of individuals to find gold by visually scanning creek beds and rock formations. When flecks of gold were spotted, the prospectors would spend time sifting through dirt to find the valuable nuggets and flecks that were left behind when dirt was washed away. That’s what modern day sales prospectors do – sift through large lists of potential customers to try and uncover those who are interested and ready to buy. Steps in the Sales ProcessUnless someone has previously done business with you, it’s a guess as to whether they might be interested in your products or services. They are potential customers at that point, falling into one of two categories: suspects or prospects. The difference between the two groups is: Suspects - Individuals or companies you believe may have a need for your products or services but who may not be aware of your business or its offerings. You suspect they could become customers, but you’re not sure. To find out, you need to increase their awareness of and familiarity with your business. Once they are aware, it’s time to determine if they might buy in the future. Prospects - Prospects are suspects you have made contact with and who have confirmed that they might be interested in buying from you at some point. For example, the owner of a 10-year-old car with 200,000 miles could be a hot prospect for your auto dealership, as long as they are aware of it. Or the husband of a woman whose 40th birthday is fast approaching could be a prospect for your jewelry store, as long as he knows where it is and is invited to come shop – perhaps with some incentives offered. A customer is a prospect who has spent money with you. Prospecting TacticsTo make contact with sales suspects – buyers who may or may not be potential customers for your business – there are a number of popular tools and tactics you can use, including:
The primary goal of these marketing efforts is to qualify a recipient as a prospect, or someone who may have a need for your business’ products or services, or not. Knowing that someone does not anticipate having a need for your offerings – and is not a prospect - helps you refine your prospect database so you can focus your marketing dollars on those people most likely to turn into customers. Start an online store for freeIt’s never been easier to own and operate a beautiful, fully-featured online store. Technique 1: The prospect databaseBefore launching your prospecting campaign, you need to collect all your contacts in a dedicated prospect database. 🤲 A lead database (also known as a lead file) ⚡ is a large directory containing a list of contacts. This contact list contains various information about the prospect, such as: prospect’s first and last name, age, gender, address, phone number, the name of the company they work for, and their position. 🔎 You are then free to add additional information to enrich the data. This information should be in line with your B2C goals. 🚀 However, for B2B target information, you can use: Company name, revenue, industry, potential contacts within the company. 🤠 👉 By grouping your prospects and concentrating them in one single file or a CRM tool (Waalaxy), you can define actions to find targetted approaches, even if it means bringing new arguments to old leads and refreshing your memory of past contacts. 🧠 
Technique 2: The prospecting planBefore starting your prospecting campaigns, you must define a precise prospecting plan. With the availability of new technologies and the abundance of social media, the opportunities to gain customers are endless. ♾️ However, you can easily get lost in this sea of profiles and spend a lot of time doing unnecessary tasks. 😣 That’s why you need to organize your leads like this:
👉 Sales prospecting becomes a priority when the competition is high. Salespeople have to work hard to get leads. Here are some key tips for conducting effective sales prospecting:
Technique 3: Field ProspectingField prospecting is a practical method of converting partners, suppliers or experts into prospects. Indeed, face-to-face meetings are an ideal opportunity to build effective relationships. 🤝 Your main goal should be to build trust and position yourself as a leader in your industry. This lead generation technique allows you to become familiar with the prospect. The goal is to find new partners. Start by giving advice before offering a solution to your leads. 💡 Link building requires high availability to attend the many events that prospects attend. Direct lead generation is an effective form of networking that allows you to discover new partnerships, maximizing your lead quantity. 💫 👉 This business method of lead generation is the best way to make a good impression and directly select your future leads. However, you have to spend a lot of time to convince your customers, but this means that it is very beneficial to find qualified leads directly. Field prospecting Field prospecting means going door-to-door to meet your potential clients and giving them a quick demo of your product/service. Technique 4: Prospecting through networkingNetworking is an effective way to do business prospecting. It is about building a network of potential customers. LinkedIn is a great professional social network that offers the opportunity to generate qualified leads. 👌 Networking on LinkedIn is a very popular method of business prospecting. 🔗 However, this requires persuasive communication strategies that include the following two steps:
👉 However, this method of prospecting requires a lot of patience, but it can be very profitable in the long run. Especially, if you use automation software to speed up this process! Network prospecting Network prospecting means using all your social media contacts in order to find new leads for your business. Technique 5: Digital prospectingDigital prospecting is the set of marketing and commercial actions carried out with the help of tools available on the Internet (website, social networks, cold emailing, etc.). The company uses them to attract potential customers and then convert them into customers. This is also known as “lead generation” or “inbound marketing“. 🎯 To be effective, BtoB digital lead generation must be aligned with its “buyer persona“. Identifying their needs, evaluating solutions, making decisions, it is therefore about understanding where they are in the customer journey. Depending on where they are in the sales funnel, a personalized digital communication will be deployed to perfectly meet their needs and expectations. 🔥 Digital prospecting Digital prospecting means using the new technologies and online tools in order to active your prospecting campaigns. Technique 6: Traditional ProspectingTraditional prospecting could be described as old-fashioned lead generation, but it is far from being outdated, contrary to what one might think, even if new technologies have turned sales and marketing strategies upside down. It comes in several forms such as: telephone or field prospecting. 🌱 Let’s first mention cold calling, it is a tool still widely used by salespeople to find leads from databases (for free or paid). This is called “cold calling” because it’s an arduous exercise due to its high failure rate. 😓 So maybe in the end, the good old technique of on-the-ground prospecting is still the best way, in terms of B2B prospecting… Since, making an effort to meet a prospect seems much more human and useful than mass formatted emails or phone calls, which are often perceived as harassment or end up in the “spam” folder. 👉 Therefore, be careful with this type of communication and always remember to personalize the messages before sending, in order to properly prepare the ground for the sale! Traditional prospecting Traditional prospecting comprises prospecting techniques like cold calling or field prospecting in order to get new leads. Technique 7: Prospecting by emailEmail prospecting involves sending emails to a large number of prospects on a purchased or rented database. This technique is effective in attracting prospects, but it is always done under certain conditions. Creating a prospecting email campaign can succeed if and only if: 👇
👉 Don’t hesitate to send follow up messages too, if you don’t get a response on the first message sent! Email prospecting example: “Hi there {{firstName}} 😎, My specialty is BtoB lead generation! We recently released some crazy content with best practices for finding buyers via LinkedIn. https://ucli.cc/l/j0e3?f={{firstName}} If you’re interested in this kind of content, we share plenty of it in our newsletter. Contact Sofia Dominguez on LinkedIn to be a part of it 😉 That aside, don’t hesitate to shoot me a message if there’s anything I do for you? 😁” Technique 8: Phone prospectingTelephone prospecting consists of calling a B2B database that corresponds a priori to your target audience. 🏹 Baptized “Cold Call”, the telephone still stands out because it facilitates human contact. However, it is wise to adopt some basic rules for a successful approach: 🙏
👉 Phone surveys are thus part of the traditional prospecting method. This is still true for most B2B or B2C companies, but cold calls need to be tailored in order to avoid frustration and complaints from targeted prospects. Cold calling script: “Hi there, My name is John Smith and I am with [COMPANY NAME], we’re a [INSERT TYPE OF COMPANY]. We’ve been scheduling brief phone calls to introduce ourselves and share best practice information. We’d like to tell you how other [INDUSTRY] companies are: 1. Protecting their global shipping operations and ensuring continuous cash flow. 2. Achieving the best possible efficiencies by connecting all [BLANK] disciplines. 3. Using to create competitive differentiation and capture market share. Do you have 30 minutes this week to discuss these benefits further?” Technique 9: Multi-channel prospectingMulti-channel prospecting is a very effective prospecting technique that consists in multiplying contacts with the same prospect. You can chat on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn, or chat openly by phone or email. 🗣️ Being everywhere makes your prospects more trustful. 😇 Be careful, it’s not about harassing them on several social networks in order to “sales pitch” your product or solution to them. Contact them several times, mainly for the purpose of exchanging ideas. 😊 This multiplied communication can also be done on the same social network, but through different means, such as direct messages, comments left on posts, etc. ✍️ 👉 LinkedIn Sales Navigator combined with our prospecting tool Waalaxy are perfect for this, since you can contact your prospects via InMail easily! Discover Waalaxy 🪐 Technique 10: New Prospecting MethodsNew prospecting media allow you to innovate your prospecting techniques and stand out from your competitors. For example, some salespeople use LinkedIn to find customers, since it’s a very good B2B and B2C lead generator. 🧨 To put it simply, your prospects are people like everyone else, and if at the end of the day or during their lunch break 🥗 they come across relevant posts on LinkedIn, which offer solutions to their daily problems, they will be interested. Besides LinkedIn, there are also discussion forums and blogs where you can talk about your area of expertise, and many prospects look for solutions there. 🧐 Buyer expectations and behavior have changed. As a result, there is a need to revisit methods to attract customers. 🎣 Here are some new sales techniques that are trending right now: “Social Selling” and “Growth Hacking“, these are techniques that will optimize your existing strategies to boost your lead acquisition. 🚀 👉 Using new prospecting methods also means adapting to the new media platforms they use to convey information. These include videos, stories, infographics, video conferencing or audio recordings. 👂 Conclusion: Prospecting TechniquesToday, the question of whether to use traditional prospecting methods or digital methods to improve your lead generation strategy is not what matters the most. 😮 Instead, the real issue is to develop a sales strategy with a higher degree of personalization that can give maximum attention to the messages sent, and to combine traditional and digital methods to optimize the existing methods. 💯 Sales prospecting is a very important step in developing business and improving the sales of companies. 🤑 For this, it is important to coordinate the strategies of acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Prospecting actually requires good preparation of the sales teams. 🏃 So, to get better results, it is important to define your goals, make the right targeting and choose the right “lead gen” technique to adopt. 🥰 What are the methods of prospecting in sales?Sales prospecting is not always easy, but combine several prospecting techniques simultaneously to reach your goals easily. 🏈 Diversifying these marketing strategies can help you attract more potential customers, here are the prospecting techniques we have seen in this article:
Of course, this list of techniques is not exhaustive! 🤔 But with well-established sales techniques, your business will excel in its field. To sell effectively, you need to master basic sales strategies, be methodical, use the right tools, and know how to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. 🤗 👽 To make everything perfect, you also need to be able to automate certain tasks, thanks to software like Waalaxy, to create automated action sequences on LinkedIn and by email! What are the best prospecting tools?A sales prospecting tool is a software that helps salespeople find new prospects, whether they are B2B or B2C prospects. 🔥 Specifically, a prospecting software can help you to:
👇 The ways of prospecting that we have discussed in this article are:
👉 There you go, now you know everything that the Waalaxy automation tool can do to boost your prospecting, so don’t hesitate anymore and try it for free today! Try Waalaxy Now 👩🚀 FAQs: Prospecting TechniquesWhat is the most effective way of prospecting?The most effective prospecting technique for acquiring customers is to take the time to listen to them. 👀 Listening means listening during a phone conversation, of course, but it also means listening on social media. 🧏 We now have great tools to “spy” on our prospects to understand their issues and identify their ” pain points “. The “pain points” are actually triggers to reach out to these prospects to start a conversation and make the interaction more human, 🤖 it’s during these exchanges that you can introduce your business and offer your prospect to move forward with you if it makes sense for them. 🤩 How to make a good commercial prospecting (according to the GDPR regulations)?Even if commercial prospecting (emails, SMS, phone, post, etc.) should help companies to retain their customers or attract new prospects, there are some rules to respect all the same to make a good commercial prospecting. 🧐 According to the provisions of the GDPR, prospecting by email is possible. However, prospects must be informed beforehand that it is a prospecting email. 📩 Moreover, individuals and professionals must give their consent and can oppose it via a box to be checked or unchecked in the email received. What are the 2 types of prospecting in sales?Also, there are two commercial prospecting techniques: traditional prospecting (phone, physical, etc.) and digital prospecting (email, social media networks, etc.). 🤓 Traditional prospecting techniques should not be ignored, as they are also effective. In fact, they complement digital prospecting techniques. You need to decide which prospecting technique to use or focus on. Analyze the needs, goals and budget to define a clear prospecting plan. 💦 You can also strengthen your acquisition funnel by running long-term sales acquisition campaigns. Finally, consider hiring qualified staff for this. 💯 Great! You know the 10 most effective prospecting techniques to attract your customers, so go ahead and apply them. 😏 Is a method of prospecting in which salespeople either telephone or go to see potential customers without appointments?Phone prospecting (cold calling)
According to one study, it takes about 18 calls with a prospect to get a real meeting and hope to turn him into a customer. This is one of the most uncertain methods. It relies on too few criteria to be sure you're providing a potential client with a solution that suits them.
What is prospecting methods in sales?Sales prospecting methods are any way a salesperson conducts outreach to source new leads or engage with existing leads. Effective prospecting methods can vary by sales organization and industry and can include email outreach, social selling, event networking, and warm outreach over the phone.
What are the 5 prospecting methods?Top 5 Methods of Prospecting. Referrals. Referral prospecting simply means prospecting through people that you know, your existing contacts, clients or business partners. ... . Content Marketing. Content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. ... . Networking. ... . Email Marketing.. What are the types of prospecting?Types of sales prospecting. Cold calling and emailing. This is the number-one sales prospecting method and is one of the fastest ways for you to grow your prospect list. ... . Referrals and networking. This is another staple of the sales world and is one of the most effective forms of sales prospecting. ... . Social media.. |
