The Art Of Prospecting – Part 3 Sales Prospecting Tips(Episode 1)

by Justin Arnold, Regional Director – North West England

Now that we have established both ‘What Is Prospecting?‘ and ‘How To Prospect‘, let’s now look at 10 top tips to use when Prospecting.

1. Look at your prospect’s career pages
2. Use the GPCTBA/CI sales qualification framework
3. Classify prospects with ratings
4. Subscribe to your prospects’ blogs
5. Keep track of your prospects via social media resources, Twitter, LinkedIn
6. Batch prospecting sessions
7. Use a healthy mix of email and phone communication
8. Use the BASHO sequence for emails and calls
9. Follow-up after a closed-lost deal
10. Look at your prospect’s career pages

1. Look at your prospect’s career pages

Look at the business’ job board to find departments in which they are investing or growing. This can further inform us of their key goals or challenges.

If our prospect is a public company, we can also look at their annual financial report via the Companies House website, and review revenue growth or declines, in addition to director statements that provide insight into trading conditions.

2. Use the GPCTBA/C&I sales qualification framework

There are “bajillion” sales qualification frameworks.

The acronym stands for:

• GPCT (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline)
• BA (Budget and Authority)
• C&I (Negative Consequences and Positive Implications)

Here is the basic breakdown and some examples of questions asked when connecting with potential customers to follow the framework:

Now we can focus on creating a highly targeted, relevant list. Based on our research, we should have a fine-tuned profile of our target customer, and every company or individual on our prospect list should meet those criteria.

3. Classify prospects with ratings

Qualitatively classify prospects by rating them on a spectrum of high, medium, and low suitability. Here’s what that looks like:

High

• Matches criteria for customer persona
• A clear business challenge that aligns with our product offering
• Able to connect with a decision-maker
• We have a mutual connection or shared interest (i.e., a mutual friend on LinkedIn or both graduated from the same college)
• High level of interaction with our website or social media accounts

Recommended effort: Five touchpoints every other business day

Medium

• Match some elements of our customer persona
• A clear business challenge that aligns with our product offering
• Able to connect with an influencer
• Some level of interaction with our website or social media accounts

Recommended effort: Four touchpoints every other day

Low

• It doesn’t match our customer persona
• Unclear business challenge
• Not able to connect with an influencer or decision-maker
• Limited or no interaction with our website or social media accounts

Recommended effort: Three touchpoints every other day

4. Subscribe to your prospects’ blogs

Kyle Van Pelt, Executive Vice President of Sales at Skience, reads 30 articles in 30 minutes every day and uses the content in his email outreach in a tailored, relevant way. And he achieved a 90% response rate.

Kyle uses Digg to subscribe to the companies’ blogs he thinks would make for good prospects.

Here’s how it works:

• Open each interesting post in a new tab
• Skim each post
• Read the most interesting posts
• After skimming through the options, narrow the final list down to the most interesting posts. There will typically be between 20-30 posts left. We should put ourselves in the prospect’s shoes as we read these articles, searching for pain points or trigger events
• Use the most interesting, relevant information we find in the articles to tailor an email or a call to our prospect

These questions will help us craft more context around our prospect’s situation, which will help us when we’re ready to make that initial contact.

5. Keep track of your prospects on Twitter

Everyone’s on Twitter – including your prospects. Create a list of top-priority prospects on Twitter to track trigger events and streamline the research process more efficiently. Here’s how to set it up on Twitter’s mobile app:

• Click your profile picture in the upper left-hand corner and click “Lists.”
• Now click the blue button with a list icon and a plus sign on the bottom right-hand corner
• Name the list and then set it to “Private” so only you can access it.
• Now add the prospects you want to track to your list. Just search for their accounts and click the button that says “Add.”

Note: You may want to group your high-priority prospects in one list, followed by your medium-priority prospects, and then low-priority.

Now we can focus on creating a highly targeted, relevant list. Based on our research, we should have a fine-tuned profile of our target customer, and every company or individual on our prospect list should meet those criteria.

Watch as this feed populates with prospect activity. We can check this every morning and afternoon to see if any trigger events have occurred that would provide a valuable opportunity for us to connect.

Look out for Episode 2 on Sales Prospecting Tips for the last 5 top tips in the list and if you have any questions, please reach out to me at any of the below.