Prospecting New Clients

Prospecting new clients is one of the most effective ways to grow your sales pipeline and increase your company’s revenue.

Sadly, B2B prospecting is something that even the most experienced salespeople struggle with sometimes.

Many salespeople avoid prospecting because they don’t see meaningful short-term results from their efforts.

In addition, without the right sales knowledge, tools and help, you can waste a lot of valuable time and resources concentrating on the wrong prospecting factors.

To help you put your sales efforts on a solid course for success, here are five effective strategies that you can use for successful B2B client prospecting:

Concept of Prospecting New Clients

The concept of prospecting new clients is as broad as your potential customer base is.

Considering your prospects as people, you can say they can be found pretty much everywhere, online (social media, for example), offline (attending specific events) or they may even contact you first (visiting your website and filling in a contact form, calling your sales department, etc.).

What is Client Prospecting?

When new leads enter the sales pipeline, they land at its first stage where they encounter the product for the first time.

Those who demonstrate their interest and willingness to move toward the next stages of the pipeline are known as prospects.

Prospect is a lead that is more likely to become a potential customer.

Usually, there are around 4-5 stages in the sales pipeline. It begins with a qualification (awareness) stage, goes through the discovery and consideration stages, rounding up at the closing or the purchase stage.

Although sales prospecting techniques are individual for each business, the final cause of sales prospecting is identical for everyone: to turn as many prospects from new leads to paying clients as possible.

Thus, we can summarize that sales prospecting is a process of creating an opportunity to make a sale. Most often it is done by inside sales reps who contact the leads via phone call or email in order to turn them into a prospect.

New Client Prospecting Methods?

There are many types of prospecting to find qualified leads. Salespeople need to prospect continually-the real question is how?  Here’s a list of several common types of prospecting:

The Phone (by far the most effective & fastest way): Many people try to avoid cold calling.

For most of us it is scary to interrupt other people and try to sell them products or services over the phone.

Trying to sell something at your first contact with a potential client is not a good idea. Instead, lead by asking what they need and try to understand their business and pain points.

Use an easy flowing, conversational script to introduce your purpose for calling and qualify the prospect. Asking questions and presenting your product or services benefits turns the focus of the call onto them instead of you.

Always try to close with a call-to-action. Depending on what you are selling it could be a presentation, a free trial or a product demo.

P.S We recommend a sales script to overcome many of your prospects’ objections like “I am not interested”, “we already work with somebody else” or “we are a small company” etc. Please contact us if you need help with creating a sales script.

Email: While email isn’t as effective as a direct conversation, it’s less scary and often a great way to introduce yourself.

The trick is to not simply send a “buy” email, but instead, offer something of value. Give a brief explanation of who you are, then provide a coupon or a free article on a relevant topic.

In-Person: There are many ways to meet potential clients and customers in person.

For B2B, you can walk into their business. Or you can call and make an appointment to meet for B2B or B2C. 

In many cases, you can meet prospects while you’re out and about at the grocery store or on an airplane, or wherever you may be.

It’s important to remember a few key points to effective in-person selling.

Don’t tell them everything all at once. Instead, find out their wants and needs are and tailor your presentation to show how your product or service is the solution to their problem.

Always have sales material on hand to help you in this process (such as samples or catalogs). Make sure and end with a call to action and a promise to follow-up.

Social Prospecting: Social prospecting is the practice of using social media platforms to find, research and interact with prospective new customers.

How does social prospecting work?

1. Define your ideal customer. Who are they? Where do they look for answers?
2. Determine which social media platforms they use. (Hint: it’s probably more than 1)
3. Search for keywords and topics relevant to your business
4. Scroll through the posts and comments to find relevant conversations that you can join
5. Jump in and answer questions or give background knowledge
6. Create new connections with potential customers through those conversations

There’s a reason why people on social media are posting or commenting – they need answers to questions. Build brand awareness and thought leadership by answering them!

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Contact us if you need help to fill your sales pipeline with leads.