4 strategies to adopt to successfully prospect when you are an innovative company

[pramaniktonmoy]

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What could be more paradoxical than an innovative company that prospects the old-fashioned way? It may seem obvious when you say it like that, but not a week goes by without us meeting an innovative company that is pursuing a commercial prospecting strategy worthy of the 2000s, if not the 90s!

The buyer requires you to modernize your sales prospecting strategy
Beyond a positioning issue, it is important to modernize your commercial prospecting strategy to meet the expectations and needs of the modern B2B buyer.

With the Internet and Social Networks, buyers have become accustomed to papua new guinea email list carrying out most of their purchasing decisions alone and only accept contact from a salesperson when they are ready to make their purchasing decision .

the 4Ps of content marketing - SLN Web

The buyer conducts a three-stage reflection : he identifies a problem that he must resolve (Awareness), he searches for and compares the solutions that are available to him (Consideration), he chooses the solution that he considers the most relevant and seeks to validate that he is making the right choice before purchasing (Decision).

You absolutely must integrate this purchasing journey into your strategy to prospect well. With this in mind, there are 4 commercial prospecting methods to stop now!

To prospect well, stop telephone prospecting
In the salesperson's toolbox, the number 1 tool is the telephone. Telephone prospecting remains in the minds of many managers or sales directors the most effective way to win new customers.

Unfortunately, and from experience, I can assure you that the exercise is complicated or even worse: inefficient. But you already know that, right?

When some prospects still answer their landline (yes, there are some!), many will pretend to have an "appointment in a few minutes", "a presentation at the end of the day that I haven't done anything on yet" or a departure on vacation that is coming up at the end of the week to cut the conversation short.

For those who really engage in conversation, they will quickly move into the digital realm. 90% will ask you for an email with a link to your site and/or a presentation of your activities.

The remaining 10% agree to continue and a minority will result in an appointment. Did you know that only 1% of cold sales calls result in an appointment?

To prospect well, stop door-to-door
Knocking on random doors in streets and business parks to meet potential prospects is a commercial prospecting exercise that builds experience... but it is far from being the best way to prospect well!

The expression "taking a door" could not better reflect what a day of door-to-door sales prospecting looks like: Do you really think that many decision-makers are going to give you 30 minutes, or even 1 hour, of their time when their own colleagues have trouble seeing them on important subjects?

Chance can help you, but at a time when predictive buyer analysis and visitor tracking tools are proliferating on your website, what role do you want to give to chance in your sales prospecting actions?

The ideal scenario: Open a door, meet a decision-maker, present your solution to them having understood their problem and follow up with a commercial proposal.

Unfortunately, this ideal description rarely comes up, and the reason is quite simple: you do not take into account the maturity of the buyer – their position in the purchasing process – in your sales prospecting strategy.

To prospect well, stop mass emailings
Without a precise segmentation approach and a complete reflection on the problems of your target, the salesperson's email list can quickly look like a long series of copy/pastes.

The only changes are the modification of the email address and the name of the recipient, regardless of the type of prospect addressed. Once very useful, the prospecting email often ends up in the trash before even being opened.

Worse still, overly aggressive use of email marketing can result in your email being given a bad score by ISPs . In this case, your reputation as a sender is damaged and your email will be sent directly to the SPAM category.

Sending hundreds of copy/pasted emails from a contact database that has been rented or purchased is not relevant: the recipient has not agreed to receive your communications, so they will not be receptive!

To prospect well, stop attending trade fairs
The meeting at a trade fair is the ideal time to meet, discuss and advance brands' interests into opportunities.

Here again, the calculation of the performance between the duration of the show, the resources present on site and the entry ticket must be taken into consideration. In summary, calculate the ratio between the cost of your presence at this show and the number of customers that you will actually sign. You will then be able to define the customer acquisition cost via this commercial prospecting technique.

Apart from the contacts whose intentions towards your company you clearly identify, other visitors only see part of you: your kakemonos, your videos broadcast on your screens and all the other decorative elements only speak about you, your brand and your products.

Taking the time to present your services to visitors to your booth without knowing their intentions is tantamount to making an unqualified appointment . The chances of achieving something concrete are, once again, quite low.