For even the most seasoned reps, finding targeted prospects has always been a challenging part of the B2B sales process.
The biggest challenges in audience prospecting include a lack of touchpoints to connect with, not enough signals to find ready-to-buy prospects, all the way to not reaching the right people to make the sale.
In this article, we’ve asked Adam Hempenstall, the CEO and Founder of Better Proposals, to help solve one of the most common prospecting problems - how to reach targeted prospects without wasting time on unqualified leads.
Strap in, and let’s begin! 👇
1. Use a reliable B2B data provider
Using a reliable source of third-party B2B data allows companies to discover their best prospects. Data vendors like Cognism provide a company and contact database where you can search for prospects that match your criteria.
Once you narrow down the search, you can prioritize your prospect list according to intent data from Bombora and sales signals. Cognism also allows you to filter out prospects with phone-verified mobile numbers so you can reach them directly.
Check out how to generate lists of targeted prospects using Cognism platform. 👇
2. Create buyer personas
Once you start digging deeper into your customers’ profiles, you’ll learn that certain types of people buy from you. At Better Proposals, we have about an even split of small businesses, freelancers and large businesses. Once you know what kind of groups buy from you, you can create personas for each customer type.
There’s no point in creating concepts just for the sake of having them; you really want to put those personas to practical use. For each one that you create, you should have a unique B2B prospecting approach. That means unique emails, marketing messages, aspects of your product/service to focus on and other ways of communicating with your target prospects.
Another major benefit of creating personas and analysing your customers is figuring out what kind of customers you’re good at selling to. For example, some of our sales team members communicate better with larger businesses, while others are great at selling to smaller accounts.
Identify which of your reps is best suited for prospecting to a new B2B lead, and your chances of getting a new customer will increase significantly.
3. Get insights from your best customers
Hopefully, you’re tracking what kind of customers…
- Stay with you the longest.
- Make repeat purchases or upsells.
- Spend more compared with the rest.
So, if you have the opportunity, contact them and ask for a short interview to learn more about them.
First and foremost, find out why they chose you over the competition and what made them stick with you long-term. Pick their brains to find out what they think your service’s best features/aspects are.
Find this out and you’ll be one step closer to becoming better at prospect targeting!
Top tip from a Adam Hempenstall:
Find a few hours every month to talk to your best, most loyal customers - because they’re the ones that keep you going.
4. Learn from your customer support team
Often, your prospect targeting is off because there’s a disconnect between who you think your ideal customer is and the reality.
For example, you may think that your best customers are small and mid-sized business owners, while in reality, you may have lots of solopreneurs buying your product.
Moreover, you may be putting lots of value on one aspect of your product or service - but in reality, people spend money with you because of something completely different.
The best way to resolve this problem is to frequently talk to your customer support and review your contact center conversations. Your CS team is on the front lines and knows exactly what pushes your customers to purchase. They’ll be able to tell you who is actually purchasing and which customers are happiest with your product or service.
For this purpose, a cloud contact centre is set up to integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) software, keeping all communication data in sync across your organisation.
What makes great sales prospecting? See below 👇
5. Start with qualified prospects
Many sales professionals treat sales like a numbers game.
You start with a large list of prospects, dwindling it down to a small list of actual buyers. The problem is this approach is a waste of time and money.
Why so?
If you start from a list of 1,000 prospects and only have 20 buyers at the end of the week, you’ve wasted your time on 980 unqualified prospects.
Instead, start with smaller lists of better-qualified target prospects. With B2B data, you can create prospect lists of people more likely to purchase.
For instance, you might have a list of 300 people and have 200 of them purchase - all because your list is better qualified at the start.
💡Tip! You might find our top customer targeting strategies helpful.
6. Write better prospecting emails
We all know that templated, canned emails aren’t good for engagement. We also know that individually writing each email to a list of 10,000 prospects will take months to do.
Given a choice between sending the same email to everyone and sending unique emails, you can go for the middle ground.
As mentioned above, you should have a pretty good idea about the different categories of target prospects that (should) buy from you. Here’s what you need to do:
For each persona, create a unique email sequence that focuses on their pain points and reasons to buy. While it may take longer than sending generic blasts, it will get you closer to achieving the famous $42 dollars of ROI for each dollar spent on emails.
7. Follow up with the right kind of content
How many times has it happened that a sale falls through the moment you send the prospect a business proposal?
It’s a headache that many SDRs have to deal with. It may not be the fact that you’re selling the wrong thing to the wrong target prospect; instead, it could be the type of content you’re sending.
Here are some best practices:
- Send business proposals that directly address your customers’ needs and desires.
- Don’t waste your time sending PDFs or .doc files, unless you want to look like you travelled in time from the 1990s!
- Use business proposal software so you can learn when your prospects open your proposals and what they do with them.
Connecting with targeted prospects: the last word
The best way to do more targeted sales prospecting is to get up and close with your customers. If you feel like you’re missing the mark with your sales efforts, in most cases, you can fix it by changing your approach.
Find out who buys from you, why they buy from you and then create a unique sales and marketing approach for each type of persona. In an age where personalisation has become a must, it doesn’t take much to engage with your target prospects in a more personalised way.
Simply follow our six tips above, and you’ll quickly see the difference they can make!
Want more audience prospecting advice?
Fear not - Cognism has got you covered!
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