Over the years, technology has given sales professionals greater access to prospects. But greater access doesn’t necessarily mean better results. With as many different channels and strategies as there are, learning how to reach prospects at the right stage requires greater care and finesse than ever before.
5 Tips for Better Prospecting
Regardless of what any internet guru or sales coach will tell you, there are no easy or effortless ways to engage prospects and close a sale. If there were simple methods like these, you’d see every sales professional in the industry driving Ferraris and living in mansions.
The reality is that sales is a challenging field where the rules are constantly changing. If you want to be successful, you must be willing to let your strategy evolve over time. In light of this, here are a few prospecting strategies and techniques you can try:
1.Understand the Who
Let’s go back to the basics and reiterate the importance of knowing who your audience is prior to prospecting.
A lot of salespeople have the entire process backward. They assume that prospecting is about connecting with people, learning about who they are, and then trying to sell them on a solution. In reality, you should familiarize yourself with who your prospects are before you ever reach out to them.
2.Diversify Your Outreach
One of the biggest mistakes salespeople make is only using a single prospecting method – typically phone or email. But according to experienced sales professional Jeff Winters, CEO of Sapper Consulting, limiting yourself to a singular medium of outreach is costly.
As Winters tells Forbes, “There’s a whole population that will never take a cold call, as well as a whole population that won’t respond to email or won’t read LinkedIn messages.” Different people respond to different mechanisms and you have to diversify your outreach in order to achieve the results you’re looking for.
3.Become a Legitimate Expert
So many salespeople posture and put forth a front to pretend like they’re knowledgeable in their respective fields, but savvy prospects see straight through industry buzzwords and jargon. If you want to take your sales prospecting to the next level, you must become a legitimate expert.
It’s not enough to learn the ins and outs of the solutions you’re selling. You need to shift your focus towards your prospects. By actually studying what your clients do and learning about their pain points, you can connect the gap that exists between their friction and your solutions.
4.Sell Yourself, Not the Solution
The best people sell themselves before they ever try to sell the solution. Your goal is to become your prospect’s go-to person. When you’re viewed as a thought leader – a wealth of knowledge – you’re the first person a prospect thinks of when they experience friction. Naturally, this also means you’ll be the first person that gets the opportunity to sell to them.
Selling yourself requires a commitment on many fronts. You have to be willing to put yourself out there, take risks, and offer up information and advice with the chance that your time may never be repaid. But if you’re willing to do these things, you’ll eventually reap the rewards of prospects who trust you and are willing to take your advice.
5.Engage Online
The beauty of the internet, and social media, in particular, is that you’re able to observe and engage people in a safe, somewhat passive manner.
Before ever reaching out to a prospect, consider engaging with them online. If they have a blog, read their posts and leave comments. If they have social media profiles, give them a follow. Like their company pages. Share their content. All of these little actions will help you connect and build up a little familiarity.
Where Can You Improve?
If you had to identify one or two areas of your sales prospecting that you’re currently struggling with, what would they be?
In all likelihood, the areas you’ve identified also happen to be areas where you’ve failed to innovate and try new things. By switching up your approach and adopting new techniques and strategies, you can give yourself a chance to thrive like never before.
