The process of prospecting constantly changes. It has evolved over the last 5, 10, 15 years, and it continues to evolve today. Buyers are more educated than they used to be, so we’re entering a new era of effective prospecting.
On today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, we talk to Ryan O’Hara, VP of marketing and growth at Lead IQ, about the new era of effective prospecting.
Are you practicing the old methods of prospecting? Are you willing to try new ones?
Prospecting changes
When Ryan first started prospecting in 2008, he recalled starting with a person’s first name, last name, title, company, email, and phone number. LinkedIn was new but not many people were using it.
Now, more people have online presences, which literally gives you an open book on how to win their hearts. It’s so easy now to figure out what the prospect is interested in.
The problem is that, since more and more people are doing it, it’s becoming less effective. For the last 10 years, these prospects have been hammered with the same cold emails and cold calls.
You have to do way more today to win your prospects over.
New movement
A lot of salespeople are working to be more human in their selling and their prospecting.
We have a chance right now to refresh and do everything right. Part of that includes learning how to be more human at scale.
The struggle is figuring out how to hit your quotas and be human at the same time.
If you’re a new company, the best approach is to do a lot of activity to figure out the best way to up your product. When you’re learning to sell a product, it’s not a bad idea to do quantity so you learn to beat objections.
Personalization
If you’re working at a bigger company, the more customization and personalization you have to do. Most people think it’s the opposite.
It’s really true now that you aren’t calling or emailing or doing social to convince someone to look at your product because it’s awesome. You’re hand-picking prospects and inviting them to engage with you because you specifically picked them.
When Lead IQ reaches out to someone, they use social every week. They use video on LinkedIn, and they reach out to anyone who engages with it, even if that person is already a customer.
We might ask them to introduce us to another person. They think it’s cool because we’re engaging with them.
It’s also important to be entertaining and appeal to the person rather than the company since people are less loyal to their companies now.
- Have interesting stats.
- Share interesting commentary.
- Start a discussion about an article they shared.
- Stay away from religion and politics.
Lead cycle
If you reach out to a prospect who isn’t in the market for your goods and services right now, engage them to create some sort of content for you.
They could write a blog post or do an interview with you, and you can help them get their name out there. At the same time, some of their customers are likely people who would want to see your products.
You’ll establish a lasting rapport that might benefit you someday.
Also if you engage with someone who isn’t a good customer, you can ask them to make a referral for you. You’ll be creating a cycle that will constantly generate warm leads for you.
Lead IQ
Ryan’s team likes to do the tedious work required before you reach out to a prospect.
- If you’re trying to determine whether anyone from your team is already working on this account
- If you hate creating leads or contacts in Salesforce
- If you want to be able to find your prospects on the web, research them, and get all of their contact info
They’re trying to mash all the steps together so that when you have to reach out to a customer, you can hit one button and get all the different sales tools.
Sales reps spend 6.8 hours a week doing data entry, but people that use Lead IQ spend less than an hour. It can save your sales reps a lot of time which will allow them to get more deals.
Consider the industry. Be thoughtful with everything you do. All it takes is one bad rep to make people decide to stop taking sales calls.
Make your prospects feel good. Make them feel like they are being scouted.
“Effective Prospecting” episode resources
You can connect with Ryan on LinkedIn by sending him a personalized message. He gets about 50 messages a day, so he only responds to the personalized messages.
You can also find him at LeadIQ, along with information about prospecting and some of the experiments they’ve done.
This episode is also brought to you in part by prospect.io, a powerful sales automation platform that allows you to build highly personalized, cold email campaigns. To learn more, go to prospect.io/tse. It will help you with your outbound to expand your outreach. Your prospecting will never ever be the same.
This episode is also brought to you byMaximizer CRM. If you aren’t sure you have the right CRM, Maximizer CRM is a personalized CRM that gives you the confidence to improve your business and increase profits. Get rid of the boring CRMs and customize to your team’s selling abilities.
Click on the link to get a free demo of what Maximizer CRM can do for you. It integrates your marketing campaign as well as your CRM.
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