How to structure and automate your prospecting to increase and predict your sales
Why is your ineffective prospecting strategy costing you millions?
Today's prospecting directly predicts tomorrow's growth. Feeding your sales pipeline must therefore be at the heart of your strategy, because if it stops or falters, the whole company is in trouble.
Yet even today, too many managers have no clear prospecting strategy or process to ensure a continuous flow of prospects to convert into new customers, and therefore revenues. Managing and feeding the pipeline is a challenge for 63% of sales managers (source: Vantage Point).
Sales people are often free to find prospects as they see fit, using the few tools at their disposal (Linkedin, Google, purchased or rented databases, CRM, telephone, email, etc.). The result: there's no common method, the tools are little or poorly used, the pipeline is under-fed, acquisition costs are high and many opportunities are missed. This can lead to frustration on the part of sales staff, but above all to a lack of visibility on the part of management when it comes to steering sales.
The aim of this article is to help you build a plan to define and execute a prospecting strategy that maximizes the effectiveness and motivation of your sales (and marketing) teams, and enables management to calmly steer the company's growth.
1. Focus on your best prospects
a) Define your priority prospecting targets
20% of your customers generate 80% of your sales
Loi de Pareto
These are generally the customers who derive the most value from your solutions and can invest large amounts with you. They remain loyal to you for a very long time, and recommend you to others.
To find your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), :
- draw up a list of your current customers,
- sort them in descending order of sales generated,
- select the first third of this list,
- identify the common denominators of these customers (e.g. number of employees, industry, website traffic, advertising spend, etc.),
- note the position of the people who were decision-makers or prescribers in the purchasing process for each of these companies.
Example of a KPI:
CEO, CMO, VP Sales of software companies with between 50 and 200 employees in France.
Above, the form for creating prospecting targets in the Blacksales application. Blacksales is a turnkey prospecting solution to organize and automate lead generation for sales reps.
b) Formalize your KPIs and share them with your teams
Once you've defined your ideal customer profile, don't hesitate to share its characteristics with all your sales, marketing and product teams. This will enable you to confirm your analysis, flesh it out with other information and, above all, focus the efforts of all your teams on the most profitable customers.
Example of targets formalized in the Blacksales application. During onboarding at Blacksales, a specific workshop is dedicated to analyzing your KPIs with one of our specialists.
c) Build your prospect lists
Now you need to compile a list of all the prospects who match your KPI, and find their contact details. This phase is very time-consuming, and often requires skills that sales and marketing teams don't have (scrapping, cleaning/unscrambling data, excluding existing hot customers and prospects, etc.).
Blacksales enables you to outsource this part of your business by providing you with a tailor-made database corresponding to your targeting criteria to feed your prospecting campaigns. Your sales teams can then focus on prospect contact and closing.
Below, the interface showing the list of prospects according to their responses to internal Blacksales campaigns.
2. Stand out from the crowd when prospecting, don't look like 99% of salespeople
a) Change your mindset (detective vs. salesman)
Most salespeople automatically think of themselves as salespeople, with a well-developed sales pitch. But this is the wrong mindset to maximize your chances of closing the deal. If you focus on your product, rather than on your prospect's problem and how you can solve it, you risk turning them off and they'll stop listening to you.
As a salesperson, you need to position yourself as a guide for your prospect. It's vital that they feel you want to help them, rather than just sell them a product. So you need to adapt your mindset and approach to the person in front of you and the issues they face.
b) Ask the right questions
During your first contact with your prospect, you'll need to find the element, the reason why he's considering new solutions for his business. That's real detective work!
Once you've identified this element, it will be much easier for you to highlight the benefits of your product for their business. Having taken the time to ask the right questions during the discovery phase, you'll be in a better position to propose the best solution to close the sale.
c) Don't seek out appointments at all costs
Last but not least, don't try to get an appointment at any price! Concentrate on what you can bring to your prospect, defining together their problem, the solution they want to implement and how to get there. If your prospect feels that you can provide an effective solution to his problem, then you've won.
You'll certainly get a first meeting, and he may even suggest it to you!
3. Don't deprive yourself of any channel for contacting your prospects
But it's essential to formalize and synchronize your contact processes to ensure uniform communication that puts your prospect at the center of attention.
a) E-mail
While e-mail is the easiest tool to use, it's not necessarily the easiest to master, not least because it's the channel where it's hardest to get a response. If your targeting hasn't been done properly, your prospect won't respond to your e-mail.
To get satisfactory results from your email campaign, the message sent must be personalized for each of your targets, and must provide a solution to the problems they are experiencing.
Blacksales solves the problem of email content by building cold emailing sequences based on your targets. Sequences are automated and continuously optimized to improve campaign results. No need to spend hours writing, Blacksales takes care of it for you. You receive all responses directly in your CRM, so your sales reps can concentrate on selling!
Example of a first-contact e-mail for the marketing departments of major retailers, customized according to sector-specific issues:
b) Linkedin
Linkedin is a highly effective tool for contacting your prospects. The platform enables you to identify prospects who correspond to your priority target, by searching for profiles by sector of activity, company or position. Once again, targeting is essential for obtaining leads via Linkedin!
Next, you'll need to follow up, listen and build a relationship with your prospect to gain his or her trust. Once you've done that, talk to them about your offer and how it will address the problem they're currently facing. Generating interest by providing a solution is the key!
Linkedin can also be very useful as a second point of contact. In fact, if your prospect hasn't responded to any of your prospecting emails, it's probably not the right prospecting channel. In such cases, don't be discouraged and contact them on Linkedin, mentioning the emails you sent them. In this way, you'll optimize your prospecting strategy by including prospects contacted via other channels.
c) The telephone
The telephone or "cold call" is one of the salesperson's main prospecting tools. This channel enables you to have direct contact with your prospect, and thus establish a much stronger bond than by e-mail.
Once you've got a qualified lead, give him a call! You'll be able to identify his or her issues more precisely. The telephone is also a very useful way of following up a prospect who hasn't shown any interest in the first place! Once again, the key is to vary your points of contact.
When you're prospecting by telephone, a number of factors will determine your effectiveness
- flow: control your flow and be articulate! Your prospect needs to understand what you're saying, or he'll lose interest.
- intonation: be relaxed, natural and adapt your attitude! Be calm with calm callers, firm with tough ones, and in a hurry when your caller is too.
- Volume: do your utmost to be audible and hear what your prospect has to say. You can't afford to miss out on important information!
- Emphasis: since memorization is less important over the phone, emphasize the points in your speech that your prospect needs to remember first.
- Smile: contrary to what you might think, a smile can be heard on the telephone, and helps to establish good contact with your prospect. If you're positive and smiling, you've got every chance of convincing your prospect!
Blacksales enables you to multiply the number of appointments obtained by your sales force, so that they can focus on direct contact. As a result, your teams will be more stimulated, and their skills will improve more rapidly.
4. Categorize your prospects' responses to prioritize & personalize your follow-ups
a) Prospects interested right away
Hot" prospects need to be dealt with as quickly as possible by your sales teams to maximize your chances of closing.
The longer you wait, the more the prospect will lose interest in your offer. Don't lose sight of the fact that they're likely to receive many e-mails like yours (less well-targeted, of course), so contacting them quickly will help you maintain their interest in your offer.
b) Interested prospects for later
Lukewarm" prospects are those who have shown an interest in your product, but aren't yet convinced. They probably need more information.
So you'll need to get back to them to clarify your offer and the value it will bring to your prospect before you can close the deal. You can also send them content likely to turn them into "hot" prospects: use cases, customer interviews, webinars, e-books, etc.
c) Prospects with objections
For this last category, you'll need to focus on handling objections. Be careful: just because a prospect refutes your arguments in the first instance, doesn't mean he's fundamentally against your offer.
It's your sales rep's ability to handle objections and negotiate that will enable you to convert an initially cold prospect into one with an interest in your product.
With the Blacksales tool, leads sent to you are categorized directly in your CRM according to their response to your campaign. The tool also sets up follow-up campaigns to track prospects that don't convert directly. Thanks to this, your sales reps can deal with individual leads more efficiently, and save a considerable amount of time. In the "Inbox" tab, you'll find all the responses to your campaigns. You can see the status of each prospect as well as details of their contact scenario (campaign, number of e-mails received, message, qualification).
5. Feed your CRM continuously
a) Opportunity tracking by the sales team
The use of a CRM is essential for managing your sales activity. Not only will it enable you to record a great deal of information about your prospects (name, position, company, contact details, etc.), but above all it will enable you to track their status in your pipeline! This will enable your sales teams to prioritize their actions according to prospects much more effectively.
Feeding the CRM remains one of the main issues for sales teams, as it will require a substantial input of data to be able to provide enough qualified leads, and this process is extremely time-consuming.
b) Lead nurturing by marketing
This process will enable you to gently transform your prospects into customers. The trick here is to push the right content at the right time. The use of email sequences is very useful in this situation, because if you plan emails in advance according to your prospects' possible responses, then you have the ability to ensure precise nurturing, which is essential in the conversion process.
For example, I know that my "lukewarm" prospect is a software publisher with 15 employees, so I'm going to e-mail him a case study on the use of my solution in a company with a similar profile. This will give my prospect a concrete idea of the benefits of my solution for his business.
c) Business analyses for management
Continuously updating your CRM will enable you to study the evolution of your business. You'll be able to contextualize your results thanks to the data collected, and take concrete action to improve your prospecting processes. This quantified follow-up is essential for optimizing your various campaigns over the long term.
Blacksales is integrated with your CRM. As a result, all campaign responses appear directly in your CRM tool; prospects are categorized and your sales reps can follow up on the contact by implementing actions based on the prospect's status. For example, if a prospect is
categorized as "lukewarm", the sales rep will know that he'll have to nurture him with specific content before he can convert him and get a deal.
6. Define KPIs to monitor your strategy
You can't drive what you can't measure.
Peter Drucker
You won't know where to place the cursor on the success of your prospecting campaigns without first defining clear objectives and monitoring.
Here are a few examples of KPIs you can track:
| Operational KPIs | Sales KPIs | Financial KPIs |
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The Blacksales platform enables you to track the evolution of the various KPIs of your campaigns. Indicators are updated every 24 hours.
Conclusion
Managing and feeding the pipeline is a major challenge for sales managers.
Even today, the main difficulty in the prospecting process remains identifying the right prospects and obtaining their contact details, in a world ruled by data: out-of-date or incomplete databases, difficulty in finding and using this data efficiently, etc. As a result, sales reps waste time prospecting in particular, and can only devote an average of 36.6% of their time to their core business: selling (source: InsideSales).
In recent years, the digitization of business processes has been at the heart of many companies' strategies, and we believe that prospecting should be no exception. By enabling you to automatically and continuously enrich your pipeline with highly qualified leads, Blacksales enables your sales teams to focus on the act of selling.
- Identify the most qualified prospects for your business and build up an up-to-date database,
- The right message, at the right time,
- Integration with your CRM and marketing tools (Hubspot, Salesforce etc.),
- Behavioral analysis and categorization of your prospects' responses to implement relevant follow-up actions,
- Onboarding, testing and support throughout the use of the solution with a consultant dedicated to optimizing your campaigns!
Today, over a hundred companies rely on Blacksales to feed their sales pipeline with quality leads.
Article translated from French