In order to practice prospecting you should create a list of low-quality prospects that you have no intention of selling to. When calling these prospect you have nothing to lose, you have no expectations and it is therefore easier to practice on these prospects. Never practice on your best prospects.
Prospecting and lead generation in sales is the lifeblood that feeds the business. No new sales leads means no new sales, which means the business is struggling.
Sales Prospecting has become much harder over the years, as prospects have changed the way they buy, forcing sales professionals to constantly adapt in order to keep pace with them.
The web, social selling and lockdowns formed a perfect storm making new customer acquisition more difficult, extending sales cycle, and leaving many teams have struggled to adapt to the new world.
The ability to engage prospects and potential buyers is one of the most important skills you can learn. Sales Professionals who can consistently fill their sales pipeline and book sales meetings will always hit target.
In terms of Lead Generation for any business there are namely two different strategies as follows:
Firstly, we have Inbound which is as it sounds refers to leads coming into the business. There are a number of different inbound strategies such as: blogging, ebooks, white papers, case studies, search engine optimisation, social media, lead management,
Secondly, Outbound – cold calling, ppc, broadcast advertising, trade shows, social media advertising, networking.
According to SaaStr 2021 60% of sales leads are now coming from Inbound and whilst this is not necessarily true for non saas sales it’s worth noting the importance of a joint approach.
The infographic below shows the difference between prospecting for SME to Mid-Market organisations through to larger Enterprise companies. No surprise that prospecting and selling to larger accounts is more labour orientated sales led approach whereas smaller accounts where it’s probably less profitable to use a sales-led approach.
The message is clear however, every business should have both an Inbound and outbound strategy. What’s more, your inbound and outbound strategy should join up and be fully integrated.
Telesales continues to be an important part of the sales process, although it’s safe to say that the old style cold calling has been replaced by more targeted warm calling strategies that increases the ROI dramatically.
The phone is one of the most powerful sales tools at your disposal – it’s a Ferrari, however, most people are so poorly trained they drive it like a supermarket trolley.
There is a reason that FBI hostage negotiators get the hostage takers on the phone. They don’t text, messenger, or snapchat them, they get them on the phone because it’s such a great communication tool.
Sales Professionals who do sales prospecting via the telephone on a regular basis are better at closing. Why? This is because sales prospecting is the most difficult activity and when it gets to closing the best sales reps then find it much easier.
With 722 million business users including all the top executives, LinkedIn is the daddy of B2B social media and a vital part of any successful sales prospecting programme. Traditionally sales reps struggled to find the contact details of decision makers and then when they did they had to fight to get past the gatekeepers.
LinkedIn provides every sales rep with the capability to make direct contact with these same people to start the selling process.
Alas LinkedIn like every other great tool is subject to abuse. Sales Professionals who use a “spray and pray” approach and just spam people with connection requests only to immediately pitch anyone who responds. In our mind this is a scorched earth policy and not the best way to build your brand.
Therefore, like every other channel LinkedIn as a channel for Sales Prospecting has become more challenging. With that said our own belief is that all the negative behaviour actually makes it easier for others to shine.
We advocate every client to develop a LinkedIn sales strategy as many people simply “connect and forget” when most companies can achieve tangible growth by simply nurturing existing connections.
Sales Prospecting Training Course ” class=”wp-image-1287″/>In a similar way to the Tele sales and LinkedIn whereby the channels are abused, misused and the ROI is declining, what was once cold email is now easily confused with generic spam.
Again, our own belief is that when others are abusing the sales channels it gives us an opportunity to shine and demonstrate best practice.
We’re great believers in old fashioned Target Account Selling which has been renamed by marketers as Account Based Marketing and email plays a huge role in this.
The secret is simple – a prospect should not be able to tell the difference between a personal email you write to a customer and they email they receive. Personalisation is key to this.
Any cold outreach programme is only as good as the data that is being used and in addition to being up to date, your data should comply with any relevant GDPR laws.
Lastly, many companies simply fail to AB test messaging to understand what is working and what can be improved. Experimenting is an essential part of selling and part of you testing programme.
In our view Sales email templates are the reason that companies are struggling to achieve any form of ROI from their cold outreach programmes.
When a sales email template is posted on Google it has already been used millions of times. It is no longer unique, it is losing it’s effectiveness every day and it’s simply sending the wrong message to your prospects.
There are lots of other ways to grab your prospects attention without using sales email templates and your emails should be personalised at a much deeper level if you want to get the response rates you desire.
Rather than advanced, intermediate or beginner we simply believe in teaching the best sales strategies and techniques for everyone.
Furthermore, in some cases we have found it is easier for new entrants to sales such as Graduates, to learn new skills, than it is for more experienced salespeople who have spent many years working in a particular way only to find those strategies no longer deliver for them.
With that said, more experienced salespeople can support beginners in training by relating real life stories and the exact context of how the new training strategies can work.
Our facilitators have years of experience and are comfortable training and coaching sales people from all levels and are experts at sales strategy, sales planning, sales process and reducing the sales cycle.
Our SaaS sales training is now delivered as a stand-alone training programme which allows us to deliver more targeted training that fits the specific needs of SaaS salespeople and sales managers.
Whether you are an SDR, a Business Development, Account Executive or Sales Managers, our SaaS training course is the most comprehensive Saas training on the market for your entire sales team.
This is primarily because whilst most training companies focus on Outbound which is important, it is only half the picture. Your SaaS business needs Inbound and Outbound.
Furthermore, our strategy integrates the Inbound and the outbound which makes them both much more effective. An integrated Inbound and Outbound selling process is hugely important.
Whilst Inbound is typically the responsibility of marketing, our team have built a track record second to none when it comes to Inbound sales, content marketing and seo.
With over 120 keywords on page 1 of Google we know exactly what it takes to build an Inbound engine that delivers a consistent flow of warm sales leads for sales to convert.
Please ask for an up to date list of keywords so you can validate this for yourselves.
Business Development has traditionally been more focused around what we would call Field Sales. Reps travelling up and down the country visiting with prospects to open new accounts.
For nearly every sales team the lockdowns ended this and whilst some will return, alas many are no longer in position or have been confined to a desk in their back bedroom.
The new sales world post lockdown requires different sales skills, different sales management skills and a very different approach to selling.
Often, the problem with sales is that there are so many distractions it becomes difficult to focus. We struggled with this ourselves and now only use Google and LinkedIn for business development.
The reason for this is simple. There are 4.33 Billion users on Google and 55% of buyers search for reviews before making a purchasing decision.
Open a browser in Google right now and search for “sales training reviews”. Yep, that’s us on page 1. Our team here are experts at Inbound as well as Outbound.
Next up we use LinkedIn as it has 722 million active users in B2B with research showing 80% of B2B social leads come from LinkedIn. So far us the question is why would you not be active on LinkedIn?
Whilst Google and LinkedIn are both powerhouses in their own right, what we have learned is that in order to be really successful your sales strategy must integrate the two. Your prospects on LinkedIn will not buy without visiting your website and your website visitors want to see who they will be dealing with so they will jump over to LinkedIn.
The real success comes when you align the two platform and make the messaging and content synergistic.
Online sales training obviously took off with the advent of lockdowns and despite the obvious advantages of face to face training, online training has maintained popularity after the end of lockdowns.
In many cases we deliver a combination of face to face training, followed by a series of online sessions to reinforce the new strategies and tactics that we need the sales team to adopt.
We typically use 90 day sprints and plan all activity in advance to ensure we embed the new techniques and strategies we teach.
We would love to have your sales team join us on our B2B Lead Generation Training course and share with you the exact strategies and tactics we use in our own business. We encourage Sales Managers to join in addition to ales teams so they can reinforce the new skills we teach throughout the selling process.
We are passionate about Inbound and Outbound and know that both our prospecting strategy and the prospecting skills we teach work.
You can book online or arrange a call with one of our coaches to answer any questions you have.
Iain Swanston has spent over 30 years in B2B sales selling, training and leading teams both domestically and internationally. In addition he serves as an Associate at Strathclyde University Business School where he has delivered the sales content for the Masters in Entrepreneurship since 2015.
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