.png)
11 sales prospecting techniques to help you shorten sales cycles:
1 - Meet your audience where they already are
You’ll have the most luck finding new prospects if you look for them where they already hang out.
For many B2B businesses, LinkedIn is a great place to start. For others, Reddit might make sense.
Rolls Royce, the luxury car dealership, prospects for customers at airplane shows. (Next to a $75 million jet, a $1 million car suddenly seems very affordable.) Plus, you know if they’re there, they’re in the market for luxury transport.
There’s nothing stopping you from doing the same. At the simplest level, B2B brands might choose to direct message leads on LinkedIn instead of Instagram.
2 - Personalize communications
Everyone hates getting cold calls. Everyone hates mass marketing.
Including you.
Your first instinct when you get a cold call is to hang up. Even if you work in sales. Your first instinct when you get a generic marketing email is to delete it. Even if you work in marketing.
Personalized messaging matters.
3 - Speak to pain points and emotional benefits
Want your prospects to finally sit up and pay attention? You need to speak to their pain points.
Personalize your messaging to drive right to the beating heart of the pain they’re feeling – the frustrations they want done with.
Emphasize the emotional benefits of the solution you’re selling. How does buying what you’re selling help them achieve the easy life they dream of? How does it help them become the talk of the office (in a good way)? How does it help them avoid being the talk of the office in a negative way?
- Can you help them earn more?
- Gain status?
- Leave earlier on a Friday?
Personalize your communications in this way.
But personalizing for every prospect isn’t scalable. That’s why you need to segment your targets.
4 - Segment connections
Segmentation is used in marketing all the time.
But it’s time you started segmenting your audience for prospecting, too.
Segmentation means “splitting up” your audience based on common attributes.
These attributes need to actually be correlated with buying your products, though. Your marketing team should have this data already, so talk to them and get it.
For example, are users of Apple products 10% more likely to buy your products? Use this to filter out less flaky leads.
Do men experience the benefits of your products differently than women? Do those with more senior job titles tend to buy quicker (shorter sales cycle), while being harder to reach?
You might want to test different messaging for each of these key groups.
A full exploration of segmentation is beyond the scope of this article, but learn how to do it, personalize your messaging for each segment, and watch leads flow into your funnel faster than you could believe.
5 - Build your personal network
No one likes a cold call.
Remember us saying that?
Well, how about an unexpected call from a friend?
If you can grow your personal network, and become a friendly face, you’ll have a much easier time getting a foot in the door.
You’ll also have an easier time winning a conversation with those you don’t know yet. (You’re more likely to accept a connection or message request on LinkedIn from someone with a lot of mutual connections, right?)
Now imagine being a friendly, trusted face with a solution to their recurring, frustrating problem. Now all of a sudden, people are champing at the bit to talk details.
6 - Play the numbers game
Like all sales, prospecting is a numbers game.
No matter how good your prospecting approach, you’ll still have days that frustrate you. Days, even, where the whole world seems against you.
But trust the numbers.
Imagine a sales team where one person does great prospecting. This person might cost the company $60,000 per year.
Imagine that you’ve got five sales reps selling full-time. They’d be doing that anyway, but thanks to our prospector, their average close rate is 1.5% higher.
If each rep does 100 calls per day, that’s more than 350 new customers per year thanks to our prospector.
To break even on the cost of hiring that person doing prospecting, the value of each of those customers in the first year would need to be just $172.
If the average lifetime value of a customer is $5,000, that’s an extra $1.75 million in won revenue thanks to our prospector.
And that’s before all the other possible downstream benefits. Like smoother onboarding, faster time-to-value for the customer, and the very real possibility that this leads to a higher average lifetime value for prospected customers.
7 - Use digital events
Digital events are excellent for prospecting leads.
Digital events can constitute:
- A significant time investment from the prospect (at least half a work day.)
- A significant show of value to the prospect.
This gives the prospect an excellent experience with your brand. You’ve given them something valuable, while showing that they’re a part of your target audience.
They’ve also already invested in you, only not with their cash. They’ve spent their time on you.
If they feel it was worth it, they’ll be that much more likely to invest in you in a different way – with their money.
This is what makes engagement metrics from digital events so wonderful. The attendees who stick around to the end, and ask a lot of questions, are engaged. If your event is focused around a specific pain point, then you know these engaged attendees are invested in finding a solution.
And now, perhaps they don’t want to spend another full business day at an all-day event, trying to figure out how to solve their problem for themselves. Perhaps, they’re convinced that’d be too much work. Perhaps, they’re convinced they should save their time, and pay for a solution. One like yours.
Richard Bracchi
8 - Create ICPs
The Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, is another marketing tool that can help with your prospecting. Though maybe it’d more suitably be called an IPP (ideal prospect profile) in this instance.
Before you can figure out if someone is a good prospect or not, you have to figure out what good actually looks like. For your business.
Who buys your products? What are they like? Do they have attributes in common?
If you can boil this down to one or more ICPs, then you have a good shot at reverse engineering past sales success, and replicating it in the future.
Where you have the data already, great. Someone in the business with data skills can figure out what these common attributes are.
If yours is a new business, though, then you can work forward to create your ICP. Get very clear on who your product is built for, and make them your ICP.
Again, if this is work your marketing team has already done (and they should have), then lift it and use it.
James Shaw
9 - Use sales triggers
Not everyone will fit your ideal prospect profile.
Some will just miss the mark. Log these folks in your CRM and track the conditions that, once met, will turn them into an ideal prospect.
Here’s an example: those who’ve purchased a similar solution, but are unhappy. They need something different, but they’re waiting for their contract to end.
If they’ll share that contract’s end date with you, you can log it in your CRM, and use it as a trigger to reach out again.
Similarly, you could use someone’s promotion to a new role as a sales trigger, and reach out to them to say congratulations. Here’s where that personalized messaging comes in.
Do them a favor by anticipating the challenges they’ll soon be facing with their newfound responsibilities, and offer them a solution (your product).
10 - Use sales prospecting tools
In sales, you need a lead list. You can’t call people without a list of numbers.
The same is true for prospecting.
But, just as it’s possible to intelligently segment an audience, personalize your messaging for each segment, send those messages en masse, and get great results quickly, so too is it possible to do the same for your sales prospecting.
Sales prospecting tools can save you a lot of time and effort. This means more time selling to more qualified prospects.
Tools like Lusha, Apollo.io, Zoominfo, and even LinkedIn Sales Navigator all save you time, and offer good return on investment.
11 - Automate
It’s not just sales prospecting tools that can save you time, though.
Any tool that helps you automate part of the prospecting process makes you more efficient.
Test AI tools and chatbots. Test automation tools like Zapier. Heck, integrate the tools you already use more closely for a specific prospecting workflow.
Your sales operations team, revenue operations team, and marketing teams can all probably help.
Just remember that not all tasks are worth automating. Automating properly takes a lot of upfront work. For the most repetitive tasks, though, it can be a massive time saver.
What is sales prospecting?
Sales prospecting is the process of actively sourcing sales qualified leads. Either by converting marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads. That is, people who’ve expressed interest in your marketing materials, to people who’ve expressed interest in your products. Or, to people who possibly represent strong leads. Sales development reps, or account executives, will actively reach out to leads to figure out if they’re worth pushing through the sales pipeline.
The difference between inbound and outbound prospecting
Inbound prospecting sees SDRs reach out to MQLs who’ve already expressed some interest in your brand. Outbound prospecting sees SDRs reach out to those who might be interested in your products, and are probably aware that solutions to exist to their problem, but haven’t shown specific interest in your brand.
The difference between B2B and B2C sales prospecting
Sales prospecting wears a slightly different mask in B2C sales than it does in B2B.
B2B prospecting
B2B sales involves longer buying cycles, with multiple decision makers. You’ll need to work with other teams to engage and win over everyone involved in the buying process.
Sales cycles aren’t just longer in B2B, they have more steps. You’ll need to have more conversations, send over more buyer enablement content, and even send bespoke proposals. You’ll negotiate on price, and details of the sale.
B2B sales prospecting accounts for all this. You might target your messaging to a particular job title, because you know they often make the final buying decision, for example.
B2C prospecting
B2C sales cycles are simpler and shorter. There’s (usually) just one person involved in the buying decision. Plus, since prices for consumer products and services are usually lower, the risk is also lower. Consumers are more likely to buy now, ask questions later. Especially when your marketing and branding are effective. Businesses are much less likely to do this.
B2C sales prospecting, then, is often less selective. You’ve a larger pool of potential prospects to work with, but your business makes less off of each sale, meaning you need the volume to make up for the lower margins.
The difference between sales prospecting and lead generation
Lead generation typically nets you marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Your marketing team owns this responsibility.
Marketing qualified leads are, naturally, leads qualified by their interest in your marketing materials. Marketing materials, though, have broad appeal, so not every MQL will be interested in your solution.
In the stages of customer awareness, marketing qualified leads are either problem aware or solution aware. They know they have a problem, and have become interested in how to solve it.
- Unaware
- Problem Aware
- Solution Aware
- Product Aware
- Most Aware
Prospecting aims to take customers from the solution aware stage, to the product aware stage. Here, they’re familiar with your product, and how it can help them solve their problem. Account executives (AEs) and sales development reps (SDRs) own this responsibility.
Prospecting aims to do this while actively building a positive relationship with those leads, where possible. Once customers have expressed interest in the product, they become sales qualified leads (SQLs) and are moved into the sales pipeline in earnest.
In short, leads are those potentially interested in your products. Prospects are those who’ve expressed genuine interest in your products, whom you’ve decided it’s worth pursuing a sale with.
James Shaw
The benefits of good sales prospecting
1 — Warmer leads
Good prospecting means warmer leads.
You’re doing the work now to filter out the people who aren’t interested in your solutions.
They might not be interested because they just don’t need a solution like yours. Or, now might not be the right time.
Whatever the reason, you’re able to set aside those who aren’t worth the targeted attention of your sales reps.
Those who make it through are those who are more likely to buy from you, meaning your sales team has an easier time.
2 — Shorter sales cycles
When you’re constantly on the hunt for the warmest leads, and constantly filtering out those who don’t make the cut, your sales reps have to do less of this warming themselves.
The result? They can skip much of the work they’d typically have to do to get a lead to express interest.
In many cases, they’ll just answer any remaining questions the prospect has, and then jump right into negotiations.
This means shorter sales cycles, which means more won revenue per unit of time.
3 — Higher close and conversion rates
The end result of all this?
Higher close and conversion rates and, therefore, more revenue for the business.
Good sales prospecting makes the entire sales process more efficient.
What makes a good prospect?
- MQLs (have shown interest in your marketing materials, which are related to your products.)
- SQLs (have shown interest in your products themselves, and may be ready to buy.)
Both types make good prospects.
But your business probably already has systems in place to capture SQLs.
These are the no-brainer leads. They’ve bought from you in the past, or they’ve booked a product demo. They’re knocking on your door, wondering how they can buy.
It’s probably the marketing-qualified leads (your MQLs), you’ll have the most luck prospecting.
But not all prospects are created equal.
Your best prospects may have:
- Similar traits to people who’ve bought from you in the past.
- Bought a similar product in the past, but their contract is coming to an end.
- Have just expressed interest in some marketing material. Like a lead magnet, or industry report.
- Have been referred to you by industry partners (yours or theirs).
This isn’t a complete list of what makes a good prospect. The most important thing to bear in mind? You simply have to have good reasons to suspect they may want to buy from you.
Find these prospects, and filter out those who are less interested, and watch your sales team’s performance skyrocket.
Looking for next steps?
10,000+ sales enablers from all over the world trust SEC to be the go-to resource for their learning and development. Benefit from our community-led resources through the insider plan, for free!
- Templates and frameworks: Save time with battle-tested and ready-to-use templates. 📖
- SEC-GPT: Solve challenges with the cumulative knowledge of our community. 🤖
- Real-world case studies: Hours of insights from leaders at Uber, Oracle, Adobe, and more. 🗣️
- Industry insights: Ungated access to first-hand research from thousands of sales enablers in our annual Salary and Landscape Report. 📈
- Supportive community: Join our global community of sales enablers whom you can bounce ideas around with and get support from other like-minded professionals. 🤝
Accelerate your career without spending a dime.
Become an SEC insider now. 👇
Sales enablement insider
Thank you for subscribing
Level up your sales enablement career & network with sales enablement experts
An email has been successfully sent to confirm your subscription.
Follow us on LinkedIn
Sales enablement insider
Thank you for subscribing
Level up your sales enablement career & network with sales enablement experts
An email has been successfully sent to confirm your subscription.
