Prospecting

Perhaps you are one of those people who have skin prickling at the thought of soliciting potential customers over the phone or via e-mail. Fortunately, these days you don't have to resort to such ways to make first contact with them. Read about the concept of prospecting - what is it, how is it done and what can you gain from it? 

40 percent of salespeople say that prospecting is the most difficult moment during the entire sales process. Can you be surprised by them? It is indeed a difficult art, especially without knowing the latest techniques and methods of customer acquisition. 

Prospecting - what is it? 

Warm leads, cold calle, prospecting ... one can get confused among these concepts, although they all deal with the same problem. The goal of any entrepreneur is to sell a product or service. For this purpose, he must select potential clients (leads). Prospecting is reaching out to them in order to get them to act. It may seem that the only thing is to find and convince as many people as possible to buy. Look at it from this side - in the prospecting process, you can also sift out those customers you don't care about and select the ones most interested in your services. If you have time, on this basis you can create various databases and then adjust the methods of communication to the needs of specific groups. What about clients who, through prospecting, turned out to be completely uninterested in you and your services? At least you know that now. You can save time and spend it hitting the ones with the best sales opportunities. 

What is the importance of prospecting in sales? 

In fact, it rarely happens that a customer will find a product himself, make a decision and make a transaction. His decision can be influenced more often. Touchpoints, i.e. places of contact with the brand, make it possible to familiarize it with a given solution and convince it that it is worth making a purchase. If at any stage you approach such a client with your offer, there is a chance that he will choose your solution over others.  

He may also decide to buy, although he planned to postpone it or was not sure if it would happen at all. Prospecting allows you to turn a person who is not yet thinking about a purchase into a potential buyer. It significantly increases the chances that the transaction will actually take place.  

Prospecting

The proof for effectiveness prospecting there may be thousands call-centers scattered around the world and focused on one thing: reaching your potential customers. Of course, there are also other methods today prospecting. 

Prospecting - methods and techniques 

Prospecting is very often based on building a contact base and direct conversations. The level of conversion increases with the proximity of the potential customer with whom you are contacting. The least effective is sending template cold e-mails to completely random people. Even here, the message opening rate is very low and it is difficult to talk about real sales support. It is similar with calling e.g. all people from the phone book. 

It is a bit better when you call or write to people from the subject database. The success of such a project depends on: 

• quality and timeliness of the database, 
• individual approach, 
• adjusting the offer to the needs and expectations of potential customers. 

Personalized prospecting is even more effective - you send a personal e-mail to each person or decide to meet in person. This takes the longest time, but produces the best results. In the era of meetings on Zoom or Skype, as well as tools for planning and sending e-mails, this process can be automated and accelerated to some extent. 

Use your lead database

Some associate prospecting only with cold e-mails or telemarketing. They do not realize that they have their own, ready base of leads, which they do not have to call blindly! Apart from the concept of cold calling or cold mailing, we can also talk about warm e-mails. "Warm" leads are nothing more than people or companies with whom you have already established contact. These can be former or current customers, friends or everyone else who is in the mailing database. Reaching these people is much easier. There is a greater chance that they will open the message or answer the phone. Or they may already be familiar with the product, company, or service - you don't need to convince them.  

Prospecting - methods

The methods of acquiring initially friendly customers include: 

• keeping a mailing list and contacting everyone on the list; 
• giving free consultations, and then prospecting to people who did not take advantage of; 
• organization of an industry event or participation in such an event; 
• cheap or free product and then contacting customers to sell them the right product. 
• Participating in groups and discussions to later reveal that you have a product to sell. 

Prospecting of this type is nothing more than calling all people from a notebook with phones. Today, such a base can be effectively built through social-media or mailing. The possibilities are virtually endless, and with the development of technology, new ones appear. This allows you to move away from cald-calli, disliked by customers, in favor of creative and effective solutions that will make your customers come to you. By offering them a webinar or interesting content in exchange for an e-mail address, you put yourself in a completely different situation than if you were to extract their data from an open e-mail database. These people want to be on your list, which means they are already initially open to prospecting! Remember that the style in which you conduct customer acquisition will also depend on whether he will buy from you in the future, and thus also on his customer lifetime value. Do you want to know more? Plan yours with us communication strategy and use all your strengths! Checkwhat exactly we can do for you.