B2B commercial prospecting: to find customers effectively Article summary What is commercial prospecting? (sales, prospects, etc.) Commercial prospecting is a
B2B commercial prospecting:
to find customers efficiently
Article Summary
What is commercial prospecting? (sales, prospects, etc.)
Commercial prospecting is an activity essential to the success and sustainability of a business. To identify commercial opportunities, the teams design and deploy a prospecting plan using different commercial . Now, traditional techniques coexist with new digital prospecting methods.
B2B prospecting: understanding the sales process
Commercial prospecting is a process which consists of finding new customers for your business. In B2B, prospects are generally business managers, purchasing managers or service managers.
The teams in charge of prospecting implement commercial to identify and qualify potential customers in companies.
In principle, this role is assigned to the sales teams. But new customer purchasing behaviors and the development of digital prospecting tend to blur the line between marketing and sales.
Define the concept of prospect before launching your commercial prospecting
To find prospects, you must first have a clear internal vision of what a prospect is. However, often the notions of suspect, lead, prospect and customer overlap and mix. A prospect is a potential customer who has gone through a qualification process. Since we have qualified him, we consider that he is sufficiently mature for a first commercial contact.
The prospect is therefore no longer a suspect or a raw lead. In fact, a suspect is just a potential buyer who has not yet been formally identified. A lead corresponds to a lead identified but not yet qualified. The prospect, for its part, meets targeting criteria previously defined by salespeople.
Prospecting and selling: what is the difference in commercial matters?
Prospecting and selling are two distinct stages of the sales process. They should therefore not be confused. Prospecting involves finding and qualifying future customers. During this phase, salespeople seek to:
- establish a relationship of trust with their interlocutor
- support them in resolving their problems
- collect data about the prospect and their needs
- keep the conversation active until the sales phase
commercial prospecting efforts . The salesperson offers his offer to the prospect and they discuss the conditions of sale together. The main risk for a salesperson is wanting to sell too early and breaking the relationship with a prospect who was not yet mature enough to buy.
Why is BtoB prospecting essential for salespeople?
For a new business, acquiring customers is a necessity to generate turnover and sustain the activity. But what about established businesses? Couldn't they be content with retaining their customers? In fact, retaining customers is significantly less costly 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 diverse: cessation of activity, dissatisfaction, changes in strategy or people, increased competition
- Having a sufficiently stocked prospect portfolio at all times allows you to continuously generate growth.
- In the event of a hard blow (economic or health crisis, loss of important customers, arrival of a very aggressive competitor, etc.), the company has a pool of potential customers to approach quickly.
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The stages of commercial prospecting
# Define a commercial prospecting plan
1- Set objectives
Before launching actions, you must first set objectives in accordance with the company's business objectives. Based on the announced turnover objective and the company's commercial performance (Lifetime Customer Value, attrition rate, etc.), it is possible to set a quantitative objective on the number of new customers to conquer over a period. Based on the prospect/customer conversion rates, the company can then define intermediate objectives such as the number of prospects to contact.
2- Choose your B2B targets
In BtoB, targeting is very important. To optimize the return on investment (ROI) of prospecting actions, we must focus on profiles with the best probability of being transformed into customers. Upstream, it is therefore essential to:
- list the types of target customers to target as a priority
- define clear targeting criteria (type of company, sector of activity, turnover, position held, problems encountered, etc.)
3- Create your commercial action plan
Once the objectives and targets are defined, the sales teams can define the prospecting actions accordingly.
Prepare the prospecting campaign
First, salespeople create a prospecting list, from 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
- leads met during a professional event
Then, depending on the targets, you must determine the appropriate prospecting methods: direct contact, telephone canvassing, social selling, etc. Finally, you must prepare and plan the campaign. Concretely, this phase consists of developing prospecting scenarios and distributing tasks within the team and planning actions.
4- Measure performance
Before taking action, it is still necessary to define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the achievement of objectives. Indeed, KPIs make it possible to evaluate the effectiveness of actions and optimize campaigns. For example, we could be interested in the number of sales appointments made over a given period.
# Launch and manage commercial prospecting actions
Everything is in place to start prospecting on the chosen land. It is essential to stay focused on the previously defined plan and not to get distracted. Otherwise, this may result in lower efficiency. Additionally, performance monitoring will be more complicated.
The other pitfall to avoid is slackening. In general, teams are motivated at the start of the campaign. But refusals, the need to make multiple restarts and fatigue can lower the pace. Here again, it is important to stick to the planned schedule.
To maintain pressure, monitoring indicators and steering actions play an essential role.
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Traditional prospecting methods in commercial matters
Field commercial prospecting
This method consisted of a salesperson going directly to the company to meet his prospect directly.
The disadvantage of field prospecting is obviously its interruptive nature. In fact, it is considered forcing and has a rather bad press. The rise of digital methods has almost put an end to this type of practice.
Professional trade fairs
Professional events are a breeding ground for prospecting. Indeed, at a show, you can reach decision-makers in your sector of activity quite easily.
In addition, these professionals will have every chance of listening. In fact, they are brought together precisely to meet customers, partners and suppliers.
The commercial effectiveness of telephone prospecting
Telephone prospecting on unqualified or poorly qualified databases is still widely used. However, phoning is particularly frustrating for salespeople.
Indeed, cold calls have several limitations:
- the famous barrier of the secretary, who refuses to pass the targeted person
- the need to multiply reminders to reach an interlocutor
- refusal of contacts to take the call
Most decision-makers believe they are over-sought and no longer respond to prospecting calls.
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Digital prospecting methods
Mass emailing
Mass emailing consists of sending a commercial message to a large internal or purchased contact base. If this technique could have worked in the past, it is now inoperable.
In fact, the number of commercial emails sent daily has exploded. As a result, mail servers have developed spam filters that prevent these unwanted messages from reaching their recipients' inboxes.
The mass mailing method is gradually being replaced by the cold mailing method.
Cold Mailing
Cold mailing is the intelligent response of marketers and sales departments to the death of mass emailing. Thanks to software like Magileads, it is now possible to send quality emails to targeted prospects. Cold mailing is the solution of the future to boost commercial prospecting. It is important to keep in mind that email prospecting is governed by the GDPR and the CNIL. To find out everything about the rights and obligations of companies when sending commercial emails, refer to our article Commercial prospecting and the CNIL: everything you need to know .
The inbound methodology (inbound marketing + inbound sales)
Inbound marketing is based on an observation: interruptive prospecting techniques no longer offer the same results. Buyers reject unwanted solicitations. Today, a buyer completes more than half of their purchasing journey online. Decision-makers are autonomous in their information gathering. And, therefore, making commercial contact occurs later and later.
How can the company take control of prospecting?
The answer consists of attracting prospects to you by sharing content with them that will help them in their decision-making. This is called inbound marketing. Then, once the lead is sufficiently qualified, the sales teams will take over, remaining in a logic of support and maturation (nurturing) of the prospect.
Social selling
Like inbound, social selling responds to new purchasing behavior. Here too, it’s about taking control from the pre-purchase phase. The playing field is little different since, this time, it is on social networks that salespeople will interact with prospects, in particular on LinkedIn. Social selling comes in 3 stages:
- Attract target customers on LinkedIn by sharing relevant content
- Connect with prospects on the network and interact regularly
- Make a sales appointment
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Modern prospecting tools
Even though we often oppose traditional prospecting and digital prospecting, they often coexist in company practices.
For example, many growth hackers scrape email addresses on LinkedIn to feed a cold email campaign or an automated sequence of commercial emails. In terms of tools, it is essential to have a complete palette including:
- An updated and easily usable contact database
- A marketing automation solution to create automated prospecting email sequences
- A scoring functionality to measure the progress of prospects in the sales cycle and trigger the transmission of hot prospects to the sales teams
- A CRM solution to allow salespeople to follow their prospects and convert them into customers
Under the influence of new purchasing behaviors, commercial prospecting has evolved significantly in recent years. “Classic” methods are losing ground in favor of digital prospecting techniques. Beyond the choice of method, companies must ask themselves the question of personalizing messages and then coordinate their tools to optimize an omnichannel prospecting approach.
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