Let’s be real: even the most successful salespeople dread finding prospects.
It’s time consuming. It doesn’t always pay off. And sometimes, it feels like you’re grasping at straws to find someone who might be the slightest receptive to your sales pitch.
Unfortunately, prospecting was, is and always will be part of getting paid — but it doesn’t have to be so frustrating.
Here are some best practices in sales prospecting to follow in “don’t” and “do” format.
Sales Prospecting Best Practice: Don’t Cold Call (As Much)
If you had to choose between calling a stranger or someone who has at least heard of your company, who would you choose?
It’s an obvious choice. And it’s obvious because cold calls have a 4.8% success rate at best (if you’re lucky) and closer to a 1% success rate on a bad day. A 2% close rate, on average… isn’t great.
Between calling someone too early, too late, when they’re eating or just having a bad day, there are better ways to make a positive introduction, right?
So…
Do Try Warm Calling Instead
When you warm call, your prospect has had at least some sort of interaction with your company. Maybe it happened through a piece of direct mail with your logo placed in a can’t-miss location. Maybe you’ve implemented a referral program. Maybe they clicked on a social media ad and visited your website.
It doesn’t matter how a prospect comes to know you (assuming it’s through curiosity or a strong reputation). It just matters that they do.
Yes, making those connections, no matter how small or superficial to begin, takes time. But the payoff is substantial: Warm calls have a conversion rate hovering around 25% — a number that should make cold calling a last resort moving forward.
How Inline CRM Helps: Our lead management system helps you categorize leads based on those more likely to convert.
Don’t Bank Too Heavily On E-Mail
We get the appeal of e-mailing prospects:
- You can schedule when to send
- You literally just push a button (assuming you have templates in place)
- You don’t have to worry if it’s a good time to talk or not
And even if you cold call, you can always leave a message.
Conversely, there’s a 50/50 chance your email won’t be seen or read. Not because what you wrote isn’t valuable — it’s because your email will be identified as spam.
Now, there are ways to increase your odds of ending up in the proper inbox, like including an unsubscribe link and compressing large images. But if e-mail is your primary prospecting method, you need to make sure you’re following dozens, if not hundreds, of best practices to make each message count.
With that in mind…
Do Make Email Part of A Multi-Channel Strategy
Have you ever browsed for something on your laptop, researched more about a product on your smartphone and then bought the item in-store because you didn’t want to wait for shipping?
Everyone has options for what, how and when they buy — and you need make it easy for customers to buy their peace of mind, too.
Mono-channel or even bi-channel marketing lacks the punch of a fully-fledged omni-channel marketing strategy. In fact, 51% of companies use at least eight channels to interact with customers. That might seem like overkill, but using a at least two channels can increase engagement rates by 166%!
Bottom line, branch out (and use A/B testing) to see more success!
How Inline CRM Helps: You can generate comprehensive reports on your marketing efforts across channels, allowing you to track and adjust the effectiveness of your multi-channel strategy.
Don’t Overwhelm
Making a sale is a delicate dance.
On the one hand, you need to contact prospects. On the other, you don’t want to come across as needy, greedy or pushy.
So, when do you pull the plug on chasing a certain lead?
If you believe in magic numbers, seven is your answer.
The Rule of 7 means a prospect must hear a message seven times before making a purchase. Ideally, you would present a message on one channel one week, the same message the week after on a different channel, wait a couple of weeks and try on a different medium.
This allows you to be being persistent while spacing things out — and reduce the risk of harming your reputation.
When when you decide it’s time, there’s actually a clever way to remove a prospect from your pipeline.
Do Tell Prospects You’re Giving Up
Hear us out.
At a certain point, prospects are going to tune you out; some sooner than later.
But wouldn’t it be better if you controlled when any prospective partnership ended? In a word: Yes.
And here’s why.
If you tell a lead they can’t have what you’re offering, the social psychological principal of scarcity kicks in. It’s human nature to want what you can’t have.
Don’t believe us?
After multiple follow up attempts with no answer, reply or open, send them a message titled “We Give Up” as your subject line or headline (if direct mail).
Imagine you received a message with those words. Odds are you’d be curious if nothing else.
Explain that it seems like the timing isn’t right and you respect their decision to not move forward. You’ll be surprised how this message leads to a contradicting action on their part. They’ll feel more compelled to reach out to you.
If all else, it’s an experience they’ll remember for awhile and make them more likely to be receptive to any future messaging if you decide to reengage.
How Inline CRM Helps: You can set certain email triggers to follow up with corresponding sales funnel messages.
In Conclusion
Following these best sales prospecting tips can turn frigid leads into red hot prospects — and our system makes it easy for you to follow them.
Go ahead and try it out risk-free, no payment needed.
