How to Prospect Business Clients

1. www.boldtolead.com

2. There are 20% salespeople makes 80% of the sales.
Top 20% have got talent and skills with enthusiasm
They are competitive, energetic, relentless, self motivated, have skills, passion, high emotional
intelligence, ask great questions, attractive presentation and winning mindset.
They make impossible to possible. They take the responsibility to make things happen.
They do not procrastinate or do not complain about market, industry cycle, CRM, price, product ,
services or customer behaviour.
They enthusiastically making phone calls, carry their business cards with them, connected through
social media, attend trade shows, ask for referrals.
They are well aware that the main reason of having not enough client, not only talent, skills, attractive
presentation but the failure of prospecting.
www.boldtolead.com

3. Top sales people know that what are in their hands actions, reactions and mindset.
Therefore, it is important to put your energy on your goals, ambition, attitude, emotions
and self discipline.
Ask these questions to you –
Am I optimistic?
Am I competitive?
AM I persistent?
Am I relentless?
Am I thirsty for knowledge?
Am I adaptable?
Am I consistently investing in me?
Am I engaging myself in inbound and outbound marketing to be connected with my
prospects?
How am I balancing my prospecting in different territory>
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4. Why most new sales people fail?
They are too desperate which shows in their voice, body language.
They are too emotional which leads to illogical decision making.
Focus on short term result. Once sales halt they take it personally and stop prospecting
while believing that it is permanent.
They work hard one month and real the results for next three months. They start looking
for golden opportunities.
Once they start procrastinate, they lack motivation to make more calls, negative self talk
saps their energy and make them feel like a loser.
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5. Success is sales is an daily, monthly, quarterly and yearly activity.
Continuation in your prospecting is key.
Know your number of calls you need to make every day, how many sales you need to
make every week, how many clients you need to meet personally.
Build the confidence and enthusiasm.
Once you know your number, statistics will give you better edge for decision making and
make adjustments where necessary. Once you are tracking your numbers consistently ,
you will be able to track efficiency and effectiveness of your sales activities.
Efficiency is the generation of activities within allocated amount of time while
effectiveness is the ratio of activities to outcome.
Efficiency + Effectiveness = Performance
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6. Three mindsets hold people from prospecting
Procrastination ( regret, failure)
-Develop the self discipline.
Perfectionism ( highly correlated with failure, self defeating behaviour & self talk)
- start small and progressive attitude is much better than perfect mediocrity
Paralysis from Analysis ( too many self doubt questions.. What if I can not make the deal?
What should I do If…? How would I know….?)
- Keep calling, talk to lots of people and meeting clients. Human being wants security,
wants to maintain status quo, want to be safe and when they do find the ready answer
they presume and when they can not find the ready answer they presume the failure is
imminent.
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7. Time management
Top sales people organize their time with dedicated activities with pure focus and try to
stay away from distractions.
They know which time in the day is the golden time for much productive work. They
prioritize their work effectively. Non-core stuff they delegate to others through proper
communication. When they have down time, they update their CRM, make follow up
calls, create proposals and cross selling existing clients.
When you are taking the responsibility of your result, then your time is the most
precious thing in your life. Your job will be generate highest return on investment for
your time.
They avoid multitask and concentrate on single thing with pure focus.
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8. Objectives of Prospecting –
Setting appointments with your prospective clients,
If you are selling complex and costly product, you often require to meet your client in
person. You need to gather information about the client, building familiarity with client's
business when you find most qualified prospects.
Close a sale,
If you are selling a low cost and low risk associated product/services, your primary
objective is to calling clients, emails or connecting through social media, serving clients
virtually if possible and completing the sales. The familiarity and understanding about
client’s business thoroughly become the secondary issue.
When you are working in a small company or a start-up, analyze which customers you
need to target from the customers' behavioral patterns or deep understanding about the
prospects who have been using these kinds of products/services in the past, their
decision making roles and budgetary windows or contractual obligations they are bound
to.
Start analyzing your product/services, how they can better fit with the emerging market
trend, what are the strengths, weaknesses and commonalities among best customers.
Develop a profile of the prospects who most likely to do business with you.
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9. The more familiar your client is with you, you will have better chance of doing business with
you and return your call, return emails and accept social media connection. And in addition,
there will be opportunity for referral.
Customer referrals comes from happy served customers and personal referrals come from
friends, family and community. Professional referrals come from the network you have built
from with professionals in the same industry or same kind of interest they possess. Top sales
people always ask for referrals and they make sure they serve their existing and new customers
well.
If you are working in an establish medium to large business, your goal will be gather data to
see the pattern, understand the previous buying behaviour of those clients, finding out missing
points in the previous services such as decision maker/authorizer, proper email address, their
budgetary procedure, their previous constraints.
Your focus will be to identify the selling opportunities and influence your clients, showing them
best opportunities and do maintain periodic follow up.
Your prospecting message should be simple, direct and relevant which will reduce the risk for
your prospect by answering WIIFM ( What’s in there for me?). You should take time to define
possible reasons why they will do business with you.
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10. Networking
There are always opportunities for networking. Ask your existing clients and new
prospects which tradeshows they attend and go there, meet new people, talk with them ,
learn about them and there will be more opportunity to find new clients. You create
connections when you ask questions.
If you are working in an establish large company, they may have already inbound and
outbound marketing strategy, their bran is recognized, generating leads are
comparatively easier than the new start up. If you are working in a small start up, brand
building and building familiarity/awareness with credibility is an integral process of
marketing and prospecting.
Sales is an art of influencing people. Social channels perform a less expensive medium
with shorter time period in this current era for building familiarity along with monitoring
competitors and industry trends.
Technology allows us to streamline vast amount of data and finding patterns out of it.
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11. Objectives of Social Selling
Connecting and engaging directly
Being aware of what is happening currently
Curating issues in real time
Conversation in real time
Educating people for the usage of the products or services, building credibility and familiarity
Researching the current data
Technological ease for conversion
Strategic prospecting campaigns
Data gathering and analyzing through Intelligence tools to understand customer behaviour such as buyer sentiment
analysis
Activities of Social Selling
Social Research
Inbound marketing
Prospecting
Event monitoring
Customer relationship Management (CRM)
Account management
Content Creation through articles, blogs, e-books, Infographics, podcasts, slide presentations, videos and case studies
E-mail marketing
Data gathering on customers and prospects
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12. Social channels to consider for your prospecting
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Google+
YouTube
Pinterest
Instagram
Tumblr
Flickr
Reddit
Snapchat
WhatsApp
Quora
Vine
Periscope
BizSugar
StumbleUpon
Delicious
Digg
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13. Getting value from social media needs consistency and discipline.
Create a value proposition statement where it shows clearly what are the tangible values prospects will
receive from using your product or services. Focus on the business objective which can be measured
and provide the enough evidence where you can gain credibility.
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14. Steps for Telephone Prospecting
Call the person who will be the decision maker. ( Hi Jess)
Introduce yourself. ( Mr Joe.. Demosnstrate that you are a professional, a short compelling message
that connects emotionally)
Mention the purpose you are calling for. ( to make an appointment)
Elaborate the because…. ( where you have heard the requirement and what your company does, what
you can do for them)
Ask for what you want (give the few appointment options this week)
Always remember when people are rejecting you , they are not rejecting you, rejecting your proposition.
Source: Fanatical Prospecting - Jeb Blount
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15. Please write us at support@boldtolead.com to share your prospecting
experience or we can help you to develop your prospecting skills to the
industry standard with winning effect.
www.boldtolead.com