Prospecting is a vital part of the sales process. By finding and qualifying leads before you’ve even contacted them, you greatly increase your chance of sealing deals. However, there is so much information out there, that it can be hard tracking a prospect’s digital footprints to discover the best way to contact them. That’s where a tool like Prospect.io comes in.
Prospect.io, which integrates seamlessly with Pipedrive, can help you find prospects who are more likely to convert into customers. Forster Perelsztejn, Content Marketing Manager at Prospect.io, explains.
“The reason we built Prospect.io is that we hate prospecting. We hate it because it’s boring, repetitive and incredibly time-consuming,” says Forster.
“Who can spend days looking for contact data, write hundreds of personal emails from their own mailbox, manually follow-up with each prospect and still be motivated for what comes after?
“The worst part of sales is killing the best part of it: great conversations with prospects.”
So, how can you improve your prospecting process?
There are four aspects of prospecting that every salesperson must improve:
Let’s dive into each of them and see how to maximize impact!
Building quality prospect lists should be your first concern. You need to identify, research and segment your prospects.
Why is that so important? Because if you don’t:
So, how do you build a great list?
You need to start by establishing the right demographic for your product and isolate the criteria that matter. In B2B, those can range from company size to location, industry, annual revenue… anything relevant for you.
Then, you need to collect contact data so you can reach out.
If you’re getting started with prospecting, you could try one of these methods:
Now that you have a list of people who might be interested in doing business with you, you need to research them deeper. If you’ve already done it while building your list, you’re already ahead of the pack!
If you haven’t, no big deal, but that should be your next step.
Why? Because all these prospects may be interested in your product or service, but maybe not for the same reasons. Anything you know about them could be useful to start a conversation.
If you’re planning on writing to a lot of prospects at the same time, sending the same message to everyone might not be the best option—even if you’ve done your research and can segment your list according to the info you’ve gathered to make your message highly relevant.
Instead of sending the same message to 500 prospects, you can send four, eight or 12 different messages to smaller groups of prospects, which is more likely to yield much better results.
How should you segment? That depends on the common denominator you think is relevant to establish a relevant message for these groups of people.
Got your prospects? Great! Now let’s figure out how to get in touch with them.
There’s a double issue when it comes to emailing cold leads:
Based on what works best with our customers, a great cold email campaign contains five steps, explains Forster:
You need to keep organized lists of who you’re going to email, when you’re going to email them and when you’re going to stop emailing them.
Forster reveals what questions you need to ask yourself to help you do this:
Outreach is its own beast, so let’s straight to Metrics.
The only way to know if what you’re doing is working is to keep track of it. Forster points out the metrics you can’t do without.
Emails opened/emails sent
You can’t get a response if your email doesn’t get opened.
How to improve it? Open rates are generally defined by the email subject line and the sender information (the “from” field). Try variations of these to see what works better.
Emails replied to/emails sent
You’re looking to start a conversation, so that’s the rate you want to increase.
Getting positive responses? You’re addressing the right market with the right message.
Getting negative responses? You’re not addressing the right market or not at the right time.
Not getting responses at all? You’re not sending the right message.
How to improve it? Work on your content: focus on your prospects and their challenges instead of what your company does. Bring value/content that helps them accomplish what you want to help them accomplish.
Emails that got at least one link clicked/emails sent.
If you’re looking to get prospects to your website, you need to check if they’re actually clicking the links you send.
How to improve it? Choose relevant anchor text, avoid linking to domains with a bad reputation and repeat your link two or three times in the email.
Trying to scale sales without good lead management is like going apple-picking without a basket—you can only bring home a couple of apples in your pockets.
That’s the tricky part.
Managing leads involves
To do that, you need:
Working in sales is not just about sales, you need to be organized. That means using a platform that gathers everything you need to know about your prospect, including every interaction you’ve had with them so you can keep the conversation going and use what has been said before to move the process forward.
2. Easy collaboration
If you’re working in a team, you need a way to make it easy to collaborate, not step on each other’s toes, so clarify what you’re doing to your colleagues.
3. Easy scaling
Things are easy with five or ten prospects, but is your system robust enough to withstand 500 or 1,000 prospects? If you want to scale your operation, you should be able to scale your lead management.
4. Easy for managers to track performance
The role of a sales manager is to assess performance, give adequate reviews and motivate the troops. If they have no idea what’s going on and what everyone is doing, they have no way to do their own job effectively.
As powerful as Excel sheets are, the slightest mistake in a formula messes up all your data, and if you freeze too many rows, data is unreadable.
Spreadsheets don’t scale, they’re not suitable for collaboration and they don’t allow to track performance accurately.
And this is why you need a CRM, regardless of whether you’re using sales automation or not.
And if you are, or want to do it, then integrating Prospect.io with Pipedrive will make your sales work 10 times easier.
If you’re among 95% of salespeople out there, this how your sales process is going to look like:
And there you are, you nailed it!
If you’d like to combine Prospect.io and Pipedrive to build your sales process, find us on the Pipedrive marketplace or at Prospect.io. For more tips on prospecting, why not read out real estate prospecting guide.
Happy prospecting!