Prospecting is an essential part of the sales process, but if you want to strike gold, you need to have a well-thought-out strategy in place.
In this guide to sales prospecting, you’ll get everything you need to know. We’ll cover the definition of sales prospecting, why it’s important, the steps in the prospecting process, and tips for success.
Sales prospecting is the process of identifying potential customers who fit your ideal customer profile and connecting with them to move them further down the sales funnel.
Prospects vs leads
A lead is at the top of your sales funnel. Leads, the broadest category in the funnel, are anyone who could realistically purchase from your company but is still unqualified by your sales team.
Once your sales team qualifies a lead as a good fit based on your ideal customer profile, that lead becomes a prospect. Your sales team will then reach out to them to learn more about them and move them toward a sale.
Your sales team might gain access to leads to convert into prospects through inbound marketing, in-person events, referrals, and other channels. Prospecting tools, which surface information about potential customers who match your ideal customer profile, can also help your team find prospects.
Why is sales prospecting important?
Prospecting is an essential part of the sales process and is instrumental to growing your business. Here’s why:
Prospecting helps fill your pipeline
Smart sales prospecting strategies help keep your pipeline full of qualified potential new customers. With a good prospecting process in place, leads will move through your pipeline toward making a purchase. Without one, you may miss out on ideal customers.
Prospecting improves sales process efficiency
The prospecting process helps your sales team qualify leads. When that process works well, your team can focus on the leads most likely to convert. This saves them time, helps them work more efficiently, and results in a higher win rate.
Prospecting helps you establish relationships
Prospecting encourages you to reach out early in the sales process. Even if this doesn’t result in a sale right away, it helps establish relationships, which can boost feelings of trust with your leads and improve your company’s reputation overall. It may also contribute to winning more sales further down the line.
The prospecting process: 7 steps for success
How does the sales prospecting process actually work? Here are seven steps to follow for sales prospecting success.
1. Gather prospects from various channels
Before you can begin reaching out to prospects, you need to collect prospects from across various channels and make sure your prospect list is organized.
You’ll likely have potential prospects coming in from marketing-driven channels, like your website content, social media posts, online ads, in-person events, and referrals. These potential customers come in as leads, which your sales team will qualify and convert into prospects.
You may also have sales-driven prospects from online research and prospecting tools. Your sales team might find prospects by conducting research on social media sites and elsewhere online. You can also use sales prospecting tools to help you find new prospects. These tools surface information about potential customers who match your ideal customer profile, helping you find prospects you otherwise wouldn’t.
As you gather prospects, you’ll need to keep your prospect data organized and integrate it into your sales process. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool that enables your sales and marketing teams to work together is the ideal solution for this. With a CRM, sales and marketing can see how many leads are coming in, where they came from, and where they are in the pipeline.
A prospecting tool that’s built into your CRM, such as Nutshell’s ProspectorIQ, can help streamline your process even further. With ProspectorIQ, you can find prospects that match your ideal customer profile and add them to your CRM with just a few clicks.
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2. Compare prospects to your ideal customer profile
Once you have your list of prospects in a digestible format, it’s time to learn a little bit about them. The main goal at this stage is to gather information to be able to compare them to your ideal customer profile—a research-based description of a company or individual that is best suited to become a customer of your business.
Depending on your business and the type of customers you’re looking for, you might want to gather:
Demographic data like location, age, gender, education level, income, and job
Attitudinal data about interests, preferences, and beliefs
Firmographic data such as industry, company size, and revenue
3. Prioritize your prospects
Next, prioritize your prospects so you know who to reach out to first. Some elements to look at when prioritizing your prospects include:
Their fit with your ideal customer profile
The size of the opportunity
The likelihood the sale will close
You might not have the exact numbers for all of these elements, but a good, informed estimate will go a long way.
4. Research prospects to personalize your outreach
One of the most important elements of any prospecting strategy is personalizing your outreach to each prospect. This helps you establish relationships and increases the likelihood of getting a response and eventually closing a deal.
To personalize your outreach, you’ll need to learn more about each prospect. There are many ways you can research prospects, including:
Exploring your prospects’ social media posts
Browsing their company websites, including their ‘about us’ pages and blog posts
Looking into the state of their industry and how the prospect compares to their competitors
If you’ve worked with similar companies in the past, reviewing the challenges those companies faced
In this stage, you want to offer value rather than sell right away. So, through your research, try to uncover your prospects’ most significant challenges and determine how your solution can help them overcome them.
5. Create outreach plans and connect with prospects
Now that you know more about your prospects, you can create brief but personalized outreach plans for each prospect and start reaching out.
You’ll need to decide on the channels you’ll use to connect with prospects, whether that’s phone, email, or another medium, as well as what to say and how to say it.
Check out these tips for successful initial outreach:
Identify a reason for connecting: Identifying a specific reason for reaching out, such as a mutual connection or a recent change in the prospect’s business, can help warm up the prospect.
Be personable and casual: In your initial conversation, focus on establishing the relationship and save the hard selling for later. While you should make it clear why you’re reaching out, asking personal, lighthearted questions about things like weekend plans is much better than sounding robotic or salesy.
Provide value: Early in your relationship with a prospect, ensure you provide value. Consider offering a free resource or audit and make it clear how your solution can benefit the prospect.
Make it about the prospect: Your first conversation should be about the prospect, not you or your business. Ask lots of questions and learn everything you can about the prospect’s pain points. In later conversions, you can provide more details about how you can help the prospect relieve those pain points.
Don’t be afraid to move on: If, during this process, you realize a prospect isn’t the right fit, don’t be afraid to move on. This isn’t a failure. It’s an opportunity to save both you and the prospect time so you can focus on prospects that are a match.
Establish a clear next step: At the end of your first conversion, make sure you establish a clear next step so you can move the relationship forward. Often, this step is booking a follow-up meeting within the next few days, but tailor the next step to your business and your prospect’s needs.
6. Follow up
If you don’t hear back from a prospect after your initial outreach, send a follow-up. Your first message may have just gotten lost in the shuffle, and another nudge might get you in the door.
The exact number of follow-ups you send is up to you, but you’ll likely want to make several attempts at connecting spaced a few days apart before sending a “breakup” message.
In your breakup message, let the prospect know you won’t be reaching out again and what value they’ll miss out on. This is sometimes the push a prospect needs to reach out, especially if they’re interested but have just been putting off getting back to you.
7. Review results and adjust as needed
As you conduct your sales prospecting, it’s important to review your results regularly and try new strategies to optimize your process.
As you prospect, make a note of what strategies work especially well and periodically review metrics to see how your sales team is performing. Based on this information, tweak your process to test new techniques and see where you can improve. Over time, you’ll gradually improve your process and results.
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An essential step of any sales prospecting strategy is the channels you use to connect with your prospects. Various methods can be beneficial, and you can use a mix of mediums to communicate with each prospect while tailoring the mediums you choose to their preferences.
Some of the most common mediums used for sales prospecting include:
Phone calls
Calling prospects on the phone is a classic prospecting method that can still be quite effective. Many of your calls will likely go unanswered, but when you do reach a quality prospect, you have an excellent chance to make an impression. Phone calls are direct and personable and can move the relationship forward faster than other methods. Good qualification and personalization processes are essential to making the most of phone calls.
Emailing
Email is another one of the most common and valuable prospecting outreach channels. Compared to phone calls, reading an email requires less time investment for prospects and doesn’t need to happen in real time, meaning your message might reach more prospects. However, email is less personable than a phone call, and your email could get lost among all the other emails people receive each day.
Another advantage of email is the ability to reach a large number of prospects at once while still personalizing your messages. You can even create personal email sequences that send follow-up emails automatically.
To succeed with email, you’ll need to craft attention-grabbing subject lines, be clear and concise in your emails, and provide actionable next steps.
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Social media is an increasingly popular channel for prospecting outreach. Sites like Twitter and Facebook can be useful, but LinkedIn is the go-to since it’s focused on professional topics.
Connecting on social media can feel more natural than other methods because these sites are designed to help people connect and people often share information that’s relevant to your prospecting.
For example, you might connect with someone on LinkedIn who works at a company that’s a good fit for your product. You might engage with their posts, establishing a relationship. If they eventually post that they started a new role where they might need your product, you could congratulate them and eventually bring up how your product could help them succeed in their new role.
Direct mail
Direct mail may seem like an old-school outreach method, but it’s an excellent way to stand out in today’s digital world. Through direct mail, you can send personalized letters, brochures, or informational resources to prospects.
This method is more costly than digital methods, but your outreach will be much more memorable than another email. You’ll want to conduct thorough research before using this method to ensure the prospect you’re contacting is well-qualified.
Events
There’s no more personable way to connect with someone than face-to-face, and events such as networking events, conferences, and trade shows provide the perfect opportunity for this. These kinds of events allow you to get to know prospects, demonstrate your products, and gather real-time feedback.
You might attend industry events you know your ideal customers will likely attend. You can even host events and invite prospects to them.
While making a good impression at the event is, of course, essential, a well-crafted follow-up that moves the relationship forward is just as important.
Referrals
Another way to connect with qualified prospects is through referrals. Your customers likely know others who may benefit from your products or services too.
To make these connections, ask customers with whom you have a good relationship if they know anyone else who may benefit from your solutions. Then, when you reach out, you have a natural way to start the conversation—by mentioning your mutual connection.
Common prospecting challenges and how to overcome them
Like anything, sales prospecting comes with its own set of challenges. Here’s a look at some of the most common challenges and how to prepare for and overcome them.
Handling rejections
Rejection is part of sales, and you’ll experience it during the prospecting process through missed calls, unanswered emails, and potential customers who just aren’t interested.
It’s important to remember that this is an entirely normal part of the sales process. Try to view rejection as an opportunity to learn and improve your strategies.
For example, if an outreach email isn’t getting responses, you can tweak it and track which changes lead to improvements. Analyzing which types of prospects respond best can help you improve your qualification strategy so you can spend your time on the contacts most likely to become customers.
Managing time effectively
Time management is another persistent challenge in sales. There’s so much you could do, and there are often many potential customers you could reach out to, so you need to know where to focus your time to get the best results.
Prioritizing your prospects can make a huge difference. Compare prospects to your ideal customer profile and evaluate factors like potential deal size and likelihood to close. Regularly reevaluate your ideal customer profile to ensure it’s still accurate.
Software such as prospecting tools and a CRM can also help you manage time more efficiently. These tools keep you organized, make collaborating easier, and enable automation.
Keeping the pipeline full
While a high volume of leads can present time management challenges, the other side of the coin is the challenge of keeping your pipeline full of qualified leads.
For a healthy pipeline, the sales and marketing teams need to work together to ensure they are on the same page about what makes a lead qualified. Collaborate with your marketing team on defining qualified leads and coordinate your prospecting efforts so that you can divide up tasks and stay aligned.
Ready to connect with your ideal customers?
Now that you know more about sales prospecting and the steps of the prospecting process, it’s time to get out there and start looking for new opportunities!
If you’re looking for a tool to help you in your journey, consider Nutshell. With our CRM, you can organize your entire sales process, collaborate with your team, and track and automate your outreach. Plus, our Nutshell IQ suite of tools, which includes ProspectorIQ, makes it easier than ever to find qualified prospects and add them to your CRM so you can start reaching out.
