In business, you must be knowing how critical it is that you must obtain meetings with your prospective customers.
Now you must also be aware by now that getting a prospect’s meeting scheduled is rarely an easy task, as it takes time and an effective approach to do it and so it is important that you must have a strategy for prospecting your customers irrespective of whether you want to sit face-to-face or appear over phone calls or do it over video call (as may be the case) for business growth.
Strategies for prospecting your customers means more than the medium or the method that you choose to use, since finding success in prospecting has more to do with how you acquire a meeting with your prospect rather than the medium or the technique that you use to perform it.
Target Your Dream Clients
The first and the foremost thing that you must remember while prospecting is that it is a profound mistake to invest time prospecting leads in your easy to use CRM who are not going to benefit from what you are selling.
Even though there are many sales reps that believe (since they need to sell) everyone is a prospect.
Now, this is certainly a poor decision since the belief that every name and every phone number is equally likely to buy or need what you sell is never true.
Hence the primary critical prospecting strategy us to define your dream customers and your targets. This is because you must always call on people and companies who will recognize the value you can create for them as being relevant for solving their pain points and needs.
Additionally, you must also target prospects who are willing to invest in your solutions while allowing your business to capture some of the values you create for your customers.
An Incredible Value Proposition for a Meeting
Always remember that when you are prospecting, you are asking your would-be customers to provide you with the gift of their time.
Therefore you need to make sure that you are using that time to your client’s benefits wisely.
Hence when you ask for a meeting, ensure that you provide a value proposition that trades enough value to command that time, even though in certain cases your prospect might not buy from you (at least not right away).
Capturing Mindshare
This strategy for prospecting and the two that follows (as well as the first two we mentioned above) reinforces and supports each other.
Now the idea of “capturing mindset” implies shaping the lens through which your prospects view their businesses, their challenges, their problems and even their opportunities.
This strategy helps in showing your prospects something that they could not see previously or enlightening your prospects by revealing something helpful (in a higher resolution) to their future.
Remember you should always make your prospects feel that the ideas you share with them are attached to you, and you care about the things that will impact your prospect’s business and you are on top of what is relevant right now and can impact your prospect’s business readily.
Hence one way you can prove to your prospects that you deserve a meeting is be making them preview the value you promised when you ask for the meeting.
An Effective Prospecting Sequence
There are several sales reps who love their phone and so believe that it is the most effective and the fastest method for gaining a meeting, while there are also others who prefer different mediums, like emails and LinkedIn for their business growth.
Now irrespective of what medium that you prefer to use, set up a prospecting sequence that allows you to be professionally persistent over time.
In fact, as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms, we found that the most effective prospective sequence is the one in which you link together different mediums for communicating with your prospective customers.
Get the chain of mediums right by testing the best sequences of the use of different mediums over time that helps in improving your results, especially if you can show up in different places, whereby you can use one medium for communication to ask for meeting, others for capturing mindshare and nurturing the relationship.
No Ask Communications and Content
Once you need to ask for a meeting, do not ask for it in every communication. Rather try to enrich the relationship with your prospective customers by providing insights and updates that might help them to think about their business in a new way.
Hence without making an ask, make an investment with your content as a deposit, as “no ask” contents can break up your communication in the right way while also demonstrating that you are someone who is thoughtful and caring about the very results that your contacts are trying to create or improve in your prospect’s businesses.
Using Multiple Methods
Instead of using phone and emails as your prospective methods, another strategy that is worth pursuing is to show up where your contacts are found.
This could include places like vendor referrals, customer referrals, networking events, social media, trade shows, traditional mail and even showing up at their front doors.
In fact, as one of the most popular vendors of business growth technology and tools, we have found that choosing all these methods can help improve your prospecting in B2B sales, as this strategy results in more new opportunities and meetings, and winning big deals which you might not have won if you had limited yourself to a single approach for selling your offerings.
Hence it can be said in a nutshell that for consultative selling, relationship selling or insight selling you primarily need a strategy that matches your approach in its professionalism and also finds the ability to create value for our prospective customers. Hence businesses needs to improve their activities to boost their results and for that, you should better enhance your effectiveness first.
