Sales prospecting is the process of connecting with the potential target audience with expectations of discovering new business. It aims at initiating a conversation with potential leads and converting them into customers. Prospecting involves collecting the contact information of the leads who may be interested in buying your products or services. Prospecting plays a vital role in the sales cycle and in producing quality lists of potential buyers.
Great salespeople are not reactive, they don’t sit back and wait for their prospects to walk in. They are proactive and reach out to their potential target audience and kick-start the process to enable sales. This process of reaching out to the right audience is what constitutes prospecting.
Traits of a successful prospector
Targeting the right audience:
Successful prospectors know what they are selling and target the right sales audience. It is essential for your salesperson to fully understand your products and services and the ideal buyer for those products and services. This means your salespeople need to have an in-depth insight of their leads and their preferences. Being aware of a prospect’s actions enables salespeople to adapt their sales strategy to prospect behavior, thus lending greater effectiveness to their sales prospecting efforts.
Value in Every touch:
Great prospectors add value to the lead in every interaction.The prospect is usually least interested in hearing your pitch, product or company history. The only thing that matters to them is how you can make their lives simpler. A good prospector will make the prospects want to talk to them by hinting how their product/service can resolve prospect’s challenges.
No Tricks:
A good prospector earns their lead’s trust by being transparent about the details of the products or services they have to offer them.
How does a Sales Enablement Software helps in Smart Sales Prospecting?
Sales enablement software with smart sales prospecting follows prospect footprints and developing appropriate, proactive responses. In order to enjoy the benefits of smart prospecting, a basic requirement is total integration of the marketing and sales functions as each possesses critical pieces of information about prospects. However this calls for coordination of all types of interaction between the business and the prospect, then reviewing each to draw an integrated prospect profile. Sales enablement software can do this.
Smart Prospecting Tools with Sales Enablement Software
Sales enablement software offers tools to create intelligent programs that respond smartly to a prospect’s behavior. It bridges a gap between the prospecting and sales conversion ratio. With the help of sales prospecting tool, salespeople can create multi-step, multi-channel lead nurturing programs using various channels including web, print and social.Smart prospecting programs automatically adjust to any specific action that a prospect may take. Here are a few examples of how a smart prospecting program works…
- E- mails: An e-mail thanking the prospect for their interest will automatically follow if they download a white paper.
- Assets: An MSP can provide a free e-book or e-guide to add value to the lead in the initial prospecting stages.
- Print: As a goodwill gesture, a company can send postcards to their top leads on July 4th wishing them a Happy Independence Day.
- Social Media: A MSP can share zero day alerts on social media. It will add value to prospects that follow the MSP on social networking platforms.
To stand out from the crowd and prospect successfully, salespeople have to come up with innovative ideas to stay in touch with potential clients. Leads need on-going attention that is relevant to them. Sales enablement software automates mundane sales prospecting tasks and lends intelligence to the sales prospecting process, while freeing up salespeople’s time so they can pay more attention to leads that are near the end of the buying cycle.
