Why do salespeople hate prospecting? What is so terrible with this necessary “evil”? People do not like exposure, something that comes with prospecting – after all, it involves calling strangers and telling them about a company that is new to them, selling a product they never heard of. All this makes prospecting a bit frightening, even though it is necessary and requires some vital steps to be taken.
Nevertheless, there are no sales without prospecting. It would be great to sell only to clients already in your client list, but this is not always feasible. In order to get some new clients, one needs to use prospecting – there are several ways to do so, including lead generation.
If it is not possible to achieve results just by relying on “known” clients, how can you feel more comfortable convincing new clients to try out your company? It can be hard for client as well, who may have the feeling of not being respected, having their time invaded, and so on. This gives major importance to having an effective selling process, so that no time or resources get wasted.
Organizing your lists is important – yes, the famous mailing lists. They do still exist and you should have lots of them. Make good use of those lists, select, create criteria on customers that really make sense for your company and, if possible, add as much information about the clients and/or their companies as possible, because this will make the research process much easier (before actually getting in touch with them).
SalesLoft can help you get your lists under control while, at the same time, taking the maximum possible results juice from them. It offers two different tools: Prospector, which helps to generate leads by using social data indexed by Google, and Cadence, which helps to deal with lists.
Cadence allows sales teams to set up their own system to deal with emails and calls. With this, teams can set up their own cadence (hence the name) throughout all this process, making things evolve much faster and easily. A positive aspect of this tool is that it works integrated with the company’s servers, meaning that there is no need to use external email services.
Getting in touch with new clients is not easy, but it needs to be done. With this in mind, try to adopt the best possible practices and results will surely come your way.