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July 22, 2018
Do You Have a Productive Prospecting Process, or Do You Rely on the Efforts of Your ‘A’ Player and Wishful Thinking for the Others?
By: Andy Hastings
Why is prospecting such a negative word? If marketing is going to contribute 30% of pipeline, sales will need to generate the other 70% of sales opportunities. Most sales reps on your team hate prospecting because they relate prospecting to cold calling from a list of leads. The ‘A’ players that know how to prospect were trained in a former role and the rest of your sales team that hates prospecting needs a prospecting process that shows them how to win.
At its core, prospecting is a process of leveraging traditional techniques and emerging practices to reach potential buyers. This does not mean you have to do the same things that have been done for decades. Read about an SBI client who used social selling to increase the number of appointments per rep from 6 to 11 per week.
Download our Prospecting Process Tool to receive help devising a Prospecting Process for your company, and to leverage a mapped out Customer Buying Process (AKA Sales Cycle).
The biggest differentiator we see in clients who are successful with prospecting and those that are not come down to 3 things:
We recently deployed a new Prospecting Process for a client, called the “P.E.N.” Process…. Let’s discuss what this prospecting process is and how a prospecting process can help your sales reps increase their prospecting output.
3 Step Prospecting Process:
Stage 1 – Prepare
Develop a plan of attack. Stage 1 is arguably the most important phase. If this phase is not executed correctly it will make the next two steps much more difficult.
We will focus on the prepare stage in this post, but if your organization needs help designing and implementing a full prospecting process join us in the Studio for a full day working session. Let’s now review the 3 steps your reps will need to do to Prepare for prospecting.
Once you understand the Ideal Customer Profile, Spend Potential and Propensity to Buy of each prospect you can arm your sales team with the best list of prospects. Your reps will like this approach a little better than being given a list of names and phone numbers.
Stage 2 – Execute
Your sales rep can now run the plays you designed using the best communication channels and tools available.
The goal of the execution stage is to run the play and connect with the prospect. Calling the prospect every day for two weeks is not the most effective way to do this. Using your social network and asking a mutual connection for an introduction or monitoring the prospects social network activity is the best way to get in.
Reps will need a social selling and referral generation playbook to accomplish this. In addition, objection handling and call advances are key areas to ensure reps are trained on.
Stage 3 – Nurture
Nurturing is the process of progressing a conversation between your sales rep and a potential buyer by delivering relevant content and information through various communication channels. Stage 3 is all about staying in the game.
Adjusting the message and channels is key. If you have confidence the prioritize phase was done correctly, you will be talking to the prospect at a company in our ideal customer profile, with high spend potential and high propensity to buy. Stay the course and progress the deal.
The difference between wasting time prospecting and generating pipeline to hit the number is a robust prospecting process.
Download our Prospecting Process Tool to receive help devising a Prospecting Process for your company, and to leverage a mapped out Customer Buying Process (AKA Sales Cycle).
Additional Resource
If you would like help developing a customized prospecting process come visit us at the Studio, and ensure you are on track to hitting your number.
Located in Dallas, TX, our facility offers state-of-the-art meeting rooms, lounge, full-service bar, and a studio used to tape our TV shows. SBI provides the location and facilitators, all at a compelling price point.
As a guest of The Studio, you’ll get unlimited access to SBI’s CEO, Partners, and a handpicked team of experts. Together we’ll focus on developing an action plan to drive stronger alignment by getting a month of work done in just eight hours. It’s an amplified experience that you can only get in one place: The Studio. I hope you join us.
Prior to SBI, Andy spent 8+ years at Constant Contact in a hyper growth SaaS environment. He brings significant expertise in direct sales, channel sales, marketing, operations and project management. Most notably, he delivered results on projects that included sales and marketing strategy, CRM design and implementation and sales productivity / enablement. Known as a problem solver who can quickly diagnose sales and marketing gaps, develop a strategy and lead cross functional teams during implementation resulting in organizations making their number.
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