Regular and effective prospecting is the foundation of a healthy sales pipeline and yet it often remains one of the most ad hoc aspects of a sales professional’s selling process and practices.
In this article, we explore the critical role prospecting plays in driving sales success and explore a number of key principles to help you optimise your prospecting efforts.
The Benefits of Regular and Effective Prospecting
According to a recent study, salespeople who consistently and proactively engage in prospecting are 27% more likely to achieve shorter sales cycles compared to those who rely on passive lead generation. Effective prospecting not only generates more leads but also helps move them through the sales funnel more efficiently, resulting in faster deals and increased revenue. On an organisation level, a study by Harvard Business Review found companies that consistently prioritise prospecting and lead generation experienced an average of 6.4% better revenue growth than companies with no formal prospecting process in place.
The Key Benefits of Prospecting
- Better understanding and coverage of your terriotory
- Fuller pipeline with a regular supply of new leads and opportunities to replace those that are won or qualified out
- More highly developed prospecting skills due to regular practice
- Shorter sales cycles and better win rates
- Larger deal sizes
- Higher sales performance
The Critical Success Factors of Prospecting
There are four key elements to prospecting that are the best place to start when focusing on improving your prospecting abilities:
- TIME: Dedicate regular time for prospecting in your operating rhythm.
- PROSPECT PROFILE: Identify your ideal prospect profile and use this to guide your prospecting.
- STRATEGY: Have a lead nurturing strategy for those leads that are not sales ready when first contacted.
- GOLDEN HOURS: Monitor when you make your prospecting calls and work out if there are “golden hours” when your ideal prospects are easiest to contact.
Incorporating prospecting into your operating rhythm
All top performing salespeople allocate dedicated time for prospecting every day or at least every week. How much of their time they need to spend prospecting in order to build a healthy pipeline can be influenced by many things including the range and maturity of their products, the size and variety of their territory and the size of their existing client base. There is research that indicates high-performers spend up to 40% of their day prospecting but whether it’s two hours a day or fifteen hours a week, what’s most crucial is you set regular time aside for prospecting and actually spend that time on outreach.
How to make the most of your dedicated prospecting time
There are two ways to make the most of your prospecting time; the first is to get as clear as possible on the characteristics of the types of sales opportunity that you are looking for. In other words, develop a clear definition of an ideal prospect that you can use to guide your prospecting activities. For more on creating your ideal prospect profile read our article here.
The second way to make the most of your prospecting time is to work out if there is a better time during the day or week to reach out to your ideal prospects. We often find that there are certain times of the day or week when it is 2-3 times easier to get through to the person you are targeting. If you can discover this for your ideal prospects it can have a very powerful compounding effect on your performance and success.
Nurturing your list of “non-sales ready” leads
It is not uncommon for 70-80% of the prospects that you contact to not be in the market for what you sell when you first make contact with them, however it is a best practice to develop a strategy on how you manage and stay in touch with these non-sales ready leads and build a relationship with them over time by continuously nurturing them with valuable content, personalised follow-ups, and meaningful interactions. By building trust and credibility with them when they are not buying, you can cultivate a long-term relationship that will lead to increased sales and loyalty in future and will ensure that you are front-of-mind when they do need to buy.
Making prospecting a habit
There are two great ways to embed prospecting into your sales habits and practices. As we’ve discussed, the first is to block out dedicated time for prospecting in your operating rhythm, and the second is to quantify it in your business plan. As you know, your business plan outlines what you need to do to achieve your sales goals and targets. By outlining how many deals you need to win to achieve your sales goal, you can then work backwards using your personal conversion rates to determine how many proposals you need to issue, how many meetings you need to win and how many prospecting calls you need to make every week to get that many meetings.
By mastering these four critical success factors; dedicating regular time to prospecting, defining your ideal prospect profile, determining the best time to call your ideal prospects and having a disciplined nurturing strategy; you can elevate your prospecting game and unlock remarkable sales results. For more content on essential sales competencies, visit our blog.
Get in touch with us today to develop your sales capabilities, designed to empower your people to sell with confidence.
