Introduction
Sales prospecting is an essential part of a business; no matter what marketing means are employed, the ultimate aim of every business is to get enough sales to make a profit. Most sales teams are given a defined time limit of achieving their goals for the business to be viable, and it is up to the sales person to hit that quota by using the right and effective methods of sales prospecting.
What is Sales Prospecting?
Prospecting can be defined as the process of searching for new customers or clients in order to develop and facilitate a business. The ultimate aim of sales prospecting is to convert all new clients or customers into revenue generating customers that helps the company post a profit when doing business with them. Sales prospecting is an important way of growing a business, for this effectively helps in creating new leads and new sources of revenue. As more and more clients and customers get onboard, more sales are generated, which in turn help the firm to drive its business growth. Firms offering sales prospecting services often help businesses channel better marketing strategies to get sales prospects.
The Process of Sales Prospecting
Proper planning on how to create a sales prospect and turn them into leads requires extensive research and proper data on potential customers. Finding leads and prospects who actually require your services or products is a better way of generating revenue that going after literally everyone whether they are interested in your products and services or not. A good value customer or client helps the business generate long term revenue that eventually change into profits. Firms that provide sales prospecting services for businesses help identify such customers using various steps of planning and advertising.
Two terms are thrown around a lot when discussing customers: lead and prospect. Lead is someone who is a potential customer, someone who is more likely to buy something from you. For example, if a person visits a particular website, he/she becomes the lead for that particular website. They are leads because they are likely to buy a product or service from the website. Prospects are those who are your target audience, whether they have interacted with your business or not. For example, for a website selling baby toys, their prospects are young mothers with 1-3 year old babies.Sales Prospecting Services
Given below is a step-by-step guide on what goes into planning a sales prospecting process:
Step 1: Researching Potential Prospects
The first step is to properly research your target group of customers which will help you define a qualified lead for your offered products and services. For example, a website that sells funky t-shirts and hoodies will usually target young teenagers and adults are the most likely customers, whereas a website selling kitchenware and house decoration items will choose married adults as their most probable target audience. The rate of profitability decides on which kinds of customers will be better leads than others.
Step 2: Connecting With Relevant Prospects to Turn Them to Leads
The second step involves connecting with relevant prospects, which is, extending them a helping hand on doing business with us. This step involves showing our business, services and products to those prospects we researched in step 1 and getting a prospect to start a business transaction with us. The ‘transaction’ may not necessarily be a monetary transaction. For example, when a prospect lands on a website, he/she is connecting with the business.
Step 3: Convincing the Leads to Close the Transaction
Just because we managed to get people to get interested in our services and products does not mean that they will buy from us. There are many complications that may arise in the way; some resolvable, and some irresolvable. Irresolvable issues are those that cannot be resolved for that particular customer, such as a website visitor from a country where the business does not operate. Resolvable are the ones that can be resolved by support staff such as payment methods, shipping costs information and many more.
Step 4: Closing the Transaction
The ultimate aim of prospecting is to close the ‘transaction’ successfully with the lead, which he/she started in step 2. This means getting the lead to do something that is the ultimate business aim of that website, such as buying a product, subscribing for a service or subscribing to an email newsletter.
