Prospecting for clients is not simply taking contacts from a list and calling without much planning to try to sell – it is, in fact, an inefficient use of the team’s time. It’s better to do this process with planning. So before you pick up the phone, follow these tips to know how to prospect effectively to get clients:
Define what a potential customer is for the company.
We’ve talked a lot on this blog about target audience, ideal customer and persona. Defining yours is key to knowing who your potential customers are. After all, you don’t want to sell to everyone, do you?
So, before you prospect for customers, define who your leads of interest are and, more importantly, what type of lead you don’t want to do business with. This saves a lot of time in prospecting because it prevents salespeople from contacting people who don’t have the right profile. Thus, you save time and energy!
There is no secret recipe for this definition. Generally speaking, it is necessary to analyze the best performing customers after a sale and answer a series of questions, such as:
– What problem does your product/service solve?
– Who is the person suffering from this problem?
– What impact does this problem have on their daily life?
– Is the person with the problem the one making the purchase decision?
– What does the person need to have to benefit from your product/service?
It is very likely that you will make adjustments to these definitions over time, based on the evolution of the business, or even observation of sales results. It’s important to have a north to start the work and improve the process.
Have an organized list of prospects to contact
The next step is to organize the prospects that need to be contacted. An ideal list contains:
– The lead’s name and phone number;
– Useful information that they have already provided in other contacts with the company, such as their position, the city they live in, the segment of the company they work in.
– Their relationship history, such as which pages they have visited on the site, whether they have ever requested a quote, what educational materials they have used.
Organize your list according to the characteristics that make the prospect more likely to enter into negotiations and make a sale. Ideally, you don’t want this contact to take too long to receive a call, so that they still have the information about your company in their head.
So instead of calling in alphabetical order, prioritize leads by order of entry and sales potential.
Do research whenever possible
A golden tip is to research prospects before making the sales call. In the case of B2B sales, it’s worth visiting the company’s website to learn a little more about their business and identify some of the needs that your product or service can meet.
This facilitates the first contact and even the evolution of the negotiation. The research can also be a qualification step. During the research, the SDR can discard the lead if they realize that they do not meet the basic requirements to become a customer.
Have a customer acquisition process in place
A customer prospecting process should include, at a minimum:
– Lead qualification criteria;
– What the primary form of contact will be (phone, email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn) and what tools will be used ;
– The number of attempts the salesperson should make;
– What questions need to be answered before taking the lead to the next level.
Similarly, also define the prospecting goals and metrics that will be tracked. The marketing team’s goals need to be considered here, to ensure they are sending the right number of leads for sales to handle.
That said, there are four criteria that qualify a good lead:
– Is he interested in your product?
– Do they need your product?
Are they capable of buying your product?
– Is the person you are addressing the decision maker?
Prospecting for software companies is a key process. It is considered one of the most important problems to be solved by software sales people. Want to know if you are doing it right? Evaluate if your team is mastering the criteria we’ve discussed in this post?
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