Effective prospecting is the key to sales. Learn strategies that help accurately identify clients, match offers, and increase conversion. Find out how to effectively reach your potential clients.
This is often due to the wrong timing of contact or a poorly matched offer. That's why prospecting is crucial – finding and contacting people who have the greatest potential to become your customers. This article will help you answer the question of how to effectively conduct prospecting to maximize your chances of making a sale.
Prospecting can be divided based on the source of obtaining information about a potential client, distinguishing the moment when the client found us and shows interest in our product or services, or we found the person by defining their potential needs and interests.
Outbound prospecting is the process of contacting people who have not expressed interest, but based on specific information, we know they meet the criteria of a potential client - we reach out to the client with a message.
Outbound prospecting is conducted through:
Inbound prospecting is the process of contacting people who found information about our company and expressed interest in our offer - the client finds us and contacts us.
Inbound prospecting is conducted through:
One of the best approaches to defining the target client in the B2B industry is the ICP - Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Persona model.
ICP - Ideal Customer Profile is based on hard demographic variables and the client's problem being solved. The profile is defined based on:
Example: A Software House operating in Germany, employing at least 100 people, using a CRM system like Hubspot, and not organizing cyclical events like webinars.
Buyer Persona, on the other hand, refers directly to the persona's motives, based on which they make a purchase and their decision-making in the purchasing process. In Buyer Persona analysis, the following are considered:
Example: Head of Sales who wants to quickly create a new customer acquisition channel because the sales plan for the current year is not aligned with OKR assumptions. They are willing to spend a 3-month equivalent of their employee's gross salary to show the board at the end of the year that their actions are effective. They can make a decision immediately.
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If we acquire a client from inbound, we have a clear picture of the situation where we know the client is interested in the service. Communication in this case is simple because it is based on the diagnosed sentiment of the client.
In the context of the outbound channel - sending messages to an unknown person - the matter is a bit more complicated. First of all, you need to consider the justification for contacting a specific person. On one hand, there is the possibility of sending to a broad group, e.g., all marketing agencies in Poland or Europe, but on the other hand, our target client will only be agencies that have a sales department (at least 3 people) in their structures. This means that communication personalization should already take place at the level of qualifying prospects for the outbound campaign.
The next step is to find the client's pain point or gain - you need to define what the client can achieve, save, earn, what problem they can solve, and when such a situation will occur and whether we can assess that it is actually happening. This is true personalization - knowing that you are the answer to the client's problem when the client is not yet looking for a solution but is aware of the problem.
Personalization through name, using the company name in the message content, is not personalization, or at least not in a form that will affect conversion - the client's response to the sent message.
In the context of specific target groups, not all communication channels will be effective.
Available choices are:
Direct:
Indirect:
Both in the inbound and outbound channel, prospecting brings results only when actions are carried out continuously over a longer period of time. At Vanderbuild, we assume a minimum period of 3 months of intensive activities as sufficient to determine whether a given thesis works or not.
For example, consistency in outbound prospecting is defined as always sending at least two follow-ups to the first message. In inbound prospecting, measurable effects should result from publishing valuable content every 3 days for 90 days.
Using an outbound channel, you can find offers to purchase ready-made databases. We do not recommend such a purchase because you never know when the data was obtained, whether it is up-to-date, and whether it is true. At Vanderbuild, for each campaign, we conduct research from scratch, each time verifying the data we process multiple times through our internal verification systems and manually, and we recommend such an approach to ensure communication is sent to correct email addresses, which significantly affects the reputation of the sending mailbox and domain.
If your goal is to create a successful prospecting campaign, follow the checklist below: