Prospecting for customers is vital to any solid and effective sales process. Anyone who believes that this channel for attracting customers to a company has ceased to be important with the arrival of new ways of attracting customers is completely mistaken.
It doesn’t matter if your company operates in the B2B or B2C market , prospecting for leads or customers should be done every day. It is a daily exercise that you or your sales team must carry out rigorously, after all, prospecting is the first step towards making a sale.
- What is Customer Prospecting?
- 8 Tips for Prospecting Every Day
What is customer prospecting?
According to the website sentidos.com.br, prospecting is a word with Latin origins, prospectione, which means the action of prospecting or researching . It is a term from the field of geology, which is which crm to choose for your sme or vse: our top 5 to describe the methods used to discover the veins or deposits of a mine.
In geology, prospecting consists of a set of geological and mining works that aim to recognize the economic value of a deposit or a mining region.
Bringing this concept to the world of sales and business, Shopfy has an interesting definition of what prospecting is and what its purpose is:
Prospecting is the first step in the sales process, which consists of identifying potential customers , also known as prospects. The goal of prospecting is to develop a database of likely customers and then systematically communicate with them in the hopes of converting them from a prospect to a current customer.
Read Also: How to Automate Customer Prospecting?
8 tips for prospecting every day
- Find and focus on your target audience
- Set aside time in your calculated properties in companies with parent-child association to prospect every day
- Actively work on your customer lists
- Ask for directions
- Build your social media presence
- Send valuable content to your prospects
- Follow-up, follow-up and follow-up
- Automate Lead Prospecting
1 – Find and focus on your target audience
There are different types of people, industries, and company sizes. You can’t and shouldn’t talk to all of them at once, so which one should you start with first?
Take some time to figure out what your ideal customer profile is, research your own sales history.
- Who are your main customers?
- Who are your worst customers?
- Who are your most profitable customers?
Create profiles for each of these groups. Don’t assume that just because a company has a sales history that it fits your ideal customer profile.
Once you’ve done this analysis, you can use your profile and existing company list to find other companies that match these criteria. This tactic will help you stay focused on fishing for the best fish in this vast ocean of opportunities.
Read Also: Market Niche: What It Is, Benefits and Examples
2 – Set aside time in your schedule to prospect every day
Just like you set aside time in your beb directory to go to the gym every day, it’s important to set aside consistent time in your schedule to prospect every day. Unless you’ve won the lottery, leads aren’t going to fall into your lap.
You have to take action to make something happen. And since prospecting isn’t always the most fun activity, setting aside this time for yourself will go a long way toward ensuring that this activity is done regularly.
3 – Actively work on your customer lists
You have a list of customers or a list of warm leads, or maybe even a list of lost leads. Set aside time each day to call the people on these lists. See where they are in the decision-making process. Are there any questions they have? Is there any information you can send them that might help them?
It’s all about staying in touch and making sure they don’t forget about you. By working on your list consistently, you can turn cold leads into warm ones or even get closer to someone with high buying potential.
4 – Ask for directions
Nothing is better than a happy customer because happy customers speak well of you .
In a 2003 Harvard Business article, “The Number You Need to Grow,” it was quoted:
The value of any customer doesn’t lie solely in what that person buys. In these interconnected days, how your customers feel about you and what they’re prepared to tell others about you can influence your revenue and profits just as much.