By expanding your presence on a variety of social media networks, you get more opportunities to engage with potential customers, showcase expertise, share valuable content, and establish credibility. Besides, it enables direct communication with prospects, expands your reach, and facilitates relationship-building, increasing the chances of converting prospects into customers in the future. 3. Segment your prospects Social selling involves using social media networks to connect with potential customers while they’re still in the early stages of the buying process. On the other hand, sales prospects are lower in the sales funnel because they have shown their intention to buy. They are ready to discuss the details of your solution with sales development reps. They are usually considered good prospects because they are aware of the need and more willing to communicate with sales reps. Every organization will focus on slightly different sales prospecting metrics for SDRs , but here are some ways you can measure your outbound prospecting success: Now, you can focus on creating a highly targeted, relevant list. Based on your research, you should have a fine-tuned profile of your target customer, and every company or individual on your prospect list should meet those criteria.

The key point here is to define the basic prospect characteristics and do a kind of scoring based on the weight of each characteristic.

How not to fix prospecting problems

However it shows up, many salespeople don’t have an easy or effective way to prioritize prospects so that they’re spending the right amount of time with each. And sometimes the organization has done a poor job in identifying their ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) causing salespeople to waste time with the wrong prospects.

Prospecting doesn't have to be a difficult and tedious process. In fact, it can be a positive experience for both sales reps and prospects. Adopt a few of the strategies we reviewed above into your workflow and experiment with different techniques and tools to see what works best for your team. Then, you'll be sure to begin converting more good-fit prospects into paying customers. The result is that our prospecting module is designed to enable you to design and build a structured, milestone-based sales process directly into the salesperson’s daily workflow. It guides salespeople through while providing everything they need at their fingertips at every moment. And it automates what can be effectively automated without resulting in spam. Kixie is one of the preeminent prospect outreach resources on the market. It's a customizable business calling and texting platform that allows you to thoughtfully and effectively time and target your sales calls — letting you connect with the right prospects at the right time. Once that information is ready, it’s time for the next step. Step 2. Qualify Leads Through Research Create (D)esire with added value: Adding value is critical in any sort of sales communication. Offer your prospect a free demo or sales guide to help them in their work, and if they accept, give it up freely. This gets your prospect more familiar with your product and gives you an opportunity for follow-up later.Business development representatives: BDRs usually focus on inbound sales prospecting. They partner with marketing to qualify inbound leads as prospects worth pursuing.

Sales reps spend almost one-fourth of their time chasing unqualified prospects due to inaccurate prospect data. This can have a massive demotivating effect on your sales reps, which can detrimentally impact your sales pipeline and ultimately your numbers. Solution: Deploy Accurate Data Say your target market consists of small- to medium-sized businesses with anywhere from 100 to 1,000 employees. You should eliminate any potential customers outside of these criteria. The age-old discussion between the sales and marketing department. This problem can be a problem of quantity or quality or both. Marketing may have good intentions and talk a big game, but there is very often a major gap between the number of leads the sales team needs and what marketing can deliver. I added this one last, as it shouldn’t be used as an excuse by salespeople to source their own prospects. Based on decades of experience and hundreds if not thousands of conversations with sales experts, here are the top 8 prospecting problems I hear, and their best-practice solutions:Prospects are leads who have been researched further and qualified — meaning they have the qualities, potential needs, and interests that align with the solution you offer.