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Prospecting with Precision: Building Trust and Opening Doors to New Opportunities

20 Jul Prospecting with Precision: Building Trust and Opening Doors to New Opportunities

Posted at 12:21h in Marketing by

It’s estimated that B2B salespeople today spend just 10% of their work time when carrying out business to business (B2B) prospecting for new leads.  So, it’s more important than ever to undertake efficient prospecting that produces sales-ready leads to support your business growth.

How are your prospects?

When surveyed, 40% of salespeople agreed that prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process. Add to this that salespeople believe it’s harder to get in front of prospects now than it was five years ago, and you’ve got a huge challenge to generate a healthy sales pipeline.

There is also evidence of a reluctance to prospect amongst salespeople, with 63% identifying cold calling prospects as the worst part of their job.

Given how crucial prospecting is for filling pipelines, it’s no surprise that some sales experts suggest salespeople spend 30-40% of their week prospecting for leads – 3 or 4 times the amount they currently do. With numerous other tasks demanding salespeople’s time, it is more essential than ever to make that time spent prospecting as efficient as it can be.  

Find out how our REACH approach can help you

Smarter prospecting

With personalisation growing in importance, it’s critical that for your sales team to understand the buyer or buying group they are targeting and gather useful background information. Reading news highlights on the website, the latest annual report and also checking out key contacts LinkedIn profiles. This can provide you with essential nuggets of data that can be used in messaging. And, avoid immediately jumping into selling or pitching. Here are three prospecting tips to help your team earn trust and open doors to new opportunities.

1.    Develop your message

Research your prospect so that you can demonstrate understanding of their industry, role, and their organisation, before carefully crafting any messaging. Then add value for the recipient in some way, for example, giving insight or ideas that could help with challenges related to their role and industry. By pinpointing and being able to express clear pain points you can solve you are demonstrating capability.

2.    Establish your credibility with value-based stories

Rather than reeling off a list of your product’s features, instead share a scenario that demonstrates similar challenges you’ve addressed with other clients and the impact of solving these problems. This will demonstrate your ability to potentially solve their problems and add value, while giving you a credibility boost. Social proof is highly valued by today’s buyer and can help to position you as a trusted authority.

3.    Share content to demonstrate your expertise

Again, by sharing the right content online and in wider social media, you can establish yourself as a subject matter expert and trusted advisor. You want the prospect to see you as someone with great experience who they can turn to to help solve their problems.

As buyers today increasingly engage with B2B salespeople later in the buying process, you need to add value earlier by taking a more consultative approach, using your broader knowledge to help the buyer recognise that you understand their challenge and are able to provide different options.

Add value from the outset

If you’re focusing your prospecting on the needs, desires, and problems of the person you’re connecting with, and can express how you help in your propositions, you can’t go wrong. Developing messaging and content around this demonstrates your value right from the start.

Talk to us today to find out how our REACH model could help you with messaging, content and sales-ready leads that support your business to grow.

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