Paul J. Meyer once said, “I’d rather be a master prospector than a wizard of speech and have no one to tell my story to.”
Prospecting is one of the most challenging tasks salespeople face. If done right, it can be an exciting experience that polishes your sales skills and allows you to find potential customers who are the perfect fit for your offer.
Your daily actions should be based upon acquiring contacts who will convert to clients, who you then cultivate a relationship with until they become your biggest promoters. In most cases, your "best" customers are your most profitable customers.
Here are a few tips for how you can prospect your way to millions:
- Identify ways to meet your ideal prospects. Start by analyzing where you met your "best" customers. Was it at an open house, a walk-in, or a referral? This will help you single out the most “lucrative” places to hang out at.
- Now think in terms of events or social organizations: What events or activities are your ideal prospects likely to attend or be active in?
- Think in terms of their digital presence: What social media channels, newsfeeds, and other digital publications are they likely to use or visit? Build your social media presence because social media is here to stay. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube are all channels that your potential buyers visit to find information. So, if you’re not there, somebody else will take your place!
- 84% of senior executives use social media to support purchasing decisions (Source)
Here are some statistics:
Send relevant content to prospects. While we all know that content helps salespeople take prospects down the sales funnel quicker, what we may not know is what type of content to send and when.
Think what you’re trying to achieve during the prospecting stage. You want your potential buyer either to pay attention and give you a chance to meet or move to the next stage, right?
This means the content you send should address the specific situation of that prospect. Nobody will listen to you if you aren’t going to talk about them.
Make sure the content is personalized by specifically addressing each prospect’s needs.
In order to increase the chance for opening, make sure that your email looks well on mobile devices, as more than half of all emails are read on-the-go. In fact, emails optimized emails for mobile devices generate 15% higher click through rates than those not optimized.
- Don’t underestimate the power of a phone call. Why? Because research shows that 69% of buyers accepted a call from a new salesperson and 27% of salespeople admit that making phone calls to new contacts is very effective.
- Another tip is to ask open-ended questions like those found in our “21 Let’s Get Acquainted” questionnaire for all your prospect lists, because asking questions and not using a sales script during a lead call translates to 74% greater success.
- Become a subject matter expert. In order to get those referrals coming in, you need to become a trustworthy expert and a provider of solutions, because 79% of prospects want their sales representatives to be trusted advisors. And, according to research, 51% of top performing salespeople report being seen as “an expert in their field”.
A salesperson possessing a way with words will never be able to outsell a person with a database of prospects. Having a database of qualifies prospects is the key to financial success. I hope you find these tips helpful on your journey of prospecting.
