B2B sales prospecting:
how to find clients efficiently
What is sales prospecting? (sales, prospects…)
Sales prospecting is essential to a company's success and long-term viability. To identify business opportunities, teams design and implement a prospecting plan that utilizes various sales . Traditional techniques now coexist with new digital prospecting
B2B prospecting: understanding the sales process
Sales prospecting is the process of finding new clients for your business. In B2B, prospects are generally company executives, purchasing managers, or department heads.
The prospecting teams implement commercial actions to identify and qualify potential clients in companies.
In principle, this role falls to the sales teams. However, new customer purchasing behaviors and the development of digital prospecting tend to blur the line between marketing and sales.
Define the concept of a prospect before launching your sales prospecting
To find prospects, you first need a clear internal understanding of what constitutes a prospect. Often, the terms suspect, lead, prospect, and client overlap and become confused. A prospect is a potential customer who has gone through a qualification process. Once qualified, they are considered ready for initial sales contact.
The prospect is therefore no longer a suspect or a raw lead. Indeed, a suspect is simply a potential buyer who has not yet been formally identified. A lead (or prospect) corresponds to a lead that has been identified but not yet qualified. The prospect, on the other hand, meets targeting criteria previously defined by the sales team.
Prospecting and selling: what's the difference in business?
Sales prospecting and sales are two distinct stages of the sales process. They should not be confused. Sales prospecting involves finding and qualifying potential clients. During this phase, salespeople aim to:
- to establish a relationship of trust with their interlocutor
- to support him in resolving his problems
- collect data on the prospect and their needs
- keep the conversation active until the sales phase
The sales phase is the culmination of all sales . The salesperson presents their offer to the prospect, and they discuss the terms of the sale together. The main risk for a salesperson is trying to sell too early and damaging the relationship with a prospect who wasn't yet ready to buy.
Why is B2B sales prospecting essential for salespeople?
For a new business, acquiring customers is essential to generating revenue and ensuring its long-term viability. But what about established companies? Couldn't they simply focus on retaining their existing customers? After all, keeping customers is significantly less expensive than acquiring new ones.
Prospecting is essential for 3 reasons:
- A company regularly loses customers (on average 10% of its customers each year, according to a Harvard Business Review study). This is called attrition (or churn). The reasons can be varied: business closure, dissatisfaction, changes in strategy or personnel, increased competition
- Having a consistently sufficient portfolio of prospects allows for continuous growth.
- In the event of a setback (economic or health crisis, loss of important clients, arrival of a very aggressive competitor, etc.), the company has a pool of potential clients to approach quickly.
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The stages of sales prospecting
# Define a sales prospecting plan
1- Set the objectives
Before launching any initiatives, it's essential to first define objectives aligned with the company's business goals. Based on the stated revenue target and the company's sales performance (Customer Lifetime Value, churn rate, etc.), a quantitative target for the number of new customers to acquire within a specific timeframe can be established. Using lead-to-customer conversion rates, the company can then define intermediate objectives, such as the number of leads to contact.
2- Choosing your B2B targets
In B2B, targeting is crucial. To optimize the return on investment (ROI) of sales prospecting efforts, it's essential to focus on profiles with the highest probability of converting into customers. Therefore, it's vital to:
- List the types of target customers to prioritize
- define clear targeting criteria (type of company, sector of activity, turnover, position held, problems encountered,…)
3- Create your sales action plan
Once the objectives and targets have been defined, the sales teams can define the prospecting actions accordingly.
Prepare the sales prospecting campaign
Firstly, the sales representatives compile a prospecting list, using one or more sources:
- leads generated by digital marketing actions (inbound leads, newsletter subscribers, etc.),
- contacts from CRM databases (to reactivate old, inactive prospects, for example),
- purchasing a prospecting file
- the leads met during a professional event
Next, depending on the target audience, the appropriate prospecting methods must be determined: direct contact, cold calling, social selling, etc. Finally, the campaign must be prepared and planned. In practical terms, this phase involves developing prospecting scenarios, dividing tasks within the team, and planning the actions.
4- Measure performance
Before taking action, it's essential to define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the achievement of objectives. KPIs allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your actions and optimize your campaigns. For example, you might look at the number of sales appointments secured over a given period.
# Launch and manage sales prospecting activities
Everything is in place to begin prospecting in the chosen areas. It is essential to remain focused on the pre-defined plan and not to get sidetracked. Otherwise, this risks resulting in reduced efficiency. Furthermore, performance monitoring will be more complicated.
The other pitfall to avoid is a drop in momentum. Teams are generally motivated at the start of a campaign. However, rejections, the need for multiple follow-ups, and fatigue can all slow things down. Here again, it's essential to stick to the planned schedule.
To maintain pressure, monitoring indicators and steering actions play an essential role.
Traditional sales prospecting methods
Field sales prospecting
This method involved a salesperson going directly to the company to meet their prospect face-to-face.
The drawback of field prospecting is, of course, its disruptive nature. In fact, it's often considered pushy and has a rather bad reputation. The rise of digital methods has almost put an end to this type of practice.
Trade shows
Professional events are an ideal setting for business development. Indeed, at trade shows, it's relatively easy to reach decision-makers in your industry.
Furthermore, these professionals will have every opportunity to listen. Indeed, they are gathered specifically to meet clients, partners, and suppliers.
The commercial effectiveness of telephone prospecting
Cold calling using unqualified or poorly qualified databases is still widely used. However, cold calling is particularly frustrating for salespeople.
Indeed, cold calling has several limitations:
- the infamous secretary's roadblock, who refuses to let the targeted person through
- the need to make multiple attempts to contact someone
- the refusal of contacts to take communication
Most decision-makers feel they are over-solicited and no longer respond to prospecting calls.
Digital prospecting methods
Mass emailing
Mass emailing involves sending a commercial message to a large database of internal or purchased contacts. While this technique may have worked in the past, it is now ineffective.
Indeed, the number of commercial emails sent daily has exploded. As a result, email servers have developed spam filters that prevent these unwanted messages from reaching recipients' inboxes.
The mass mailing method is gradually being replaced by the cold mailing method.
Cold Mailing
Cold emailing is the smart response from marketers and sales teams to the decline of mass emailing. Thanks to software like Magileads, it's now possible to send high-quality emails to targeted prospects. Cold emailing is the solution of the future for boosting sales prospecting. It's important to keep in mind that email prospecting is governed by the GDPR and the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority). To learn everything about the rights and obligations of companies when sending commercial emails, refer to our article "Sales Prospecting and the CNIL: Everything You Need to Know ."
The inbound methodology (inbound marketing + inbound sales)
Inbound marketing is based on a simple observation: interruptive prospecting techniques no longer deliver the same results. Buyers reject unwanted solicitations. Today, a buyer completes more than half of their purchasing journey online. Decision-makers are independent in their information gathering. And, therefore, sales contact is occurring later and later.
How can the company take the lead in a prospecting strategy?
The answer lies in attracting prospects by sharing content that helps them make their decision. This is called inbound marketing. Then, once the lead is sufficiently qualified, the sales teams take over, continuing to nurture and support the prospect.
Social selling
Like inbound marketing, social selling addresses new buying behaviors. Here too, the goal is to take control from the pre-purchase stage. The playing field is similar, as this time salespeople interact with prospects on social media, particularly LinkedIn. Social selling unfolds in three stages:
- Attracting target customers on LinkedIn by sharing relevant content
- Connect with prospects on the network and interact regularly
- Securing a business appointment
Tools of modern sales prospecting
Although traditional prospecting and digital prospecting are often contrasted, they often coexist in business practices.
For example, many growth hackers scrape email addresses from LinkedIn to fuel a cold emailing campaign or an automated sequence of marketing emails. In terms of tools, it's essential to have a comprehensive suite including:
- An up-to-date and easily usable contact database
- A marketing automation solution for creating automated prospecting email sequences
- A scoring feature to measure the progress of prospects in the sales cycle and trigger the transfer of qualified leads to the sales teams
- A CRM solution to enable sales representatives to track their prospects and convert them into customers
Driven by new purchasing behaviors, sales prospecting has evolved significantly in recent years. Traditional methods are losing ground to digital prospecting techniques. Beyond choosing a method, companies must consider personalizing their messages and then coordinate their tools to optimize an omnichannel prospecting approach.
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B2B Sales Prospecting: Finding Clients Effectively Article Summary What is sales prospecting? (sales, prospects…) Sales prospecting is an essential activity for the success and sustainability of a business. To identify business opportunities,
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