Every marketer wants to manage the growth of their business effectively, but which B2B prospecting tactics will yield the most optimal performance? Alpha Delivered growth engine helps with generating sales leads for growing companies. We would love to share these B2B Prospecting Tactics that are working for Alpha Delivered users, and help you streamline your sales process.
We suppose that closing the deal is where you would like to spend most of your time, but prospecting is almost as important as sales calls and meetings. You always need to keep that pipeline full, thus prospecting is a never ending process.
Best B2B prospecting tactics for your Business
- What does B2B sales prospecting mean?
- Creating Targeted Lists
- Deliver Cold Emails to Inbox
- Include Cold Calling in Your Sales Prospecting Strategies
- LinkedIn Social Media Platforms for Social Prospecting
- Inbound Strategies
- Next Steps
Consider these sales prospecting methods and B2B prospecting tactics to keep the top of your sales funnel full, bringing in the right customers and grow your business.
What does B2B sales prospecting mean?
In the business world, the term “prospecting” is used a variety of different ways. For example, you might hear someone say they’re going to “prospect for new customers” or “prospect for new business opportunities.” But what does B2B sales prospecting mean?
B2B sales prospecting is the process of finding and qualifying potential customers (prospects) for your products or services. It’s the first and crucial step of the sales process, usually done by sales development representatives, and it can be challenging to do well – especially if you don’t know where to start. But with the right tools and investments in learning sales prospecting techniques, you can make it much more manageable.
Creating Targeted Lists
Creating a targeted List is the first thing that you do when prospecting for new connections. It is important to determine whom and how you would like to engage with, so the first thing you need to do is to create an ideal customer profile. Write down your target audience’s needs, wants, decision-making factors, and pain points – and don’t make a mistake by thinking that details are not important. Carefully crafted ideal customer profiles will be the cornerstone of your sales prospecting strategy that will help you generate leads worth the time of your sales team. Then create your custom lists of customers by city, state, country, zip code, profession, industry, or buying habits. It’s crucial that the lists you create are accurate, current, standardized, and have emails properly validated.
As reported by DMA, the estimated ROI from email campaigns reached 3.800%. Applying better marketing intelligence to your list building process will help you achieve effective prospecting, resulting in better leads.
Our digital marketing agency has a decade of experience and access to market intelligence platform “Alpha Delivered”. Our team can provide you with an effective email marketing campaign, and a targeted list of sales leads that are matching your campaign.
Avoid buying 3rd Party Lists
Email marketers are always looking for ways to grow their lists. However, one of the worst things you can do is buy a 3rd party email list. Not only is it against the law in many cases, but it’s also a surefire way to get your emails marked as spam.
While we do help our clients to obtain curated customer lists, we aren’t very keen on recommending the majority of data vendors. Buying lists from third party data aggregators is not a bullet proof method of obtaining quality leads. The reason for this is the fact that even the most reputable data aggregators simply don’t care enough about their list purity.
List hygiene is the most important thing that determines the inboxing rate of your email marketing campaigns. When your lists have bounce rates higher than 5%, your entire lists suffer, and on average, as soon as you start hovering your bounce rate around 10%, more than half of your list doesn’t get their emails delivered to the inbox at all. Important statistics to bare in mind.
So instead of buying 3rd party lists, shift your content marketing goal towards generating high-quality leads. You can achieve this by writing informative content, promoting your products across social media channels, and including attractive calls to action on your landing pages. People prefer receiving emails from a company that is well-known to them. However, keep in mind that building your own lists takes time, so don’t rush when marketing content and ensure every piece of information that your company publishes is of high quality.
Deliver Cold Emails to Inbox
Emails play a central role in your prospecting efforts. They are one of the most efficient ways to reach out and make a meaningful connection with your prospects.
According to the Radicati Group research, 293 billion emails are sent daily worldwide in 2019. Around 109 billion is business email out of this total number.
Around 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute their content, as stated by the Content Marketing Institute. Besides, fifty-nine percent of them consider email as their top channel for revenue generation.
Integrate Email Marketing into your business campaign and experience how the most cost-effective online channel can improve your profitability. It doesn’t only have to bring benefits to you but also your clients. Use the opportunity to make it a two-way conversation. It is crucial to provide value to your potential customers with each email. Remember, your messages should revolve around the recipient’s needs, responsibilities, challenges, and similar – not yours. If you find it difficult to get prospects to open your emails, learning how to write attention-grabbing sales prospecting email subject lines can help you power up your cold email marketing game. And as it can be challenging to keep track of each individual’s needs and actions, which is necessary for crafting personalized messages, you should consider using sales prospecting software that will allow you to scale the prospecting process.
You shouldn’t consider following-up your contacts multiple times annoying. Maybe they have opened your email but forgot to reply. A little follow-up is what will remind them of your existence and opportunity. We are utilizing email throughout lead follow-up sequences to ensure that we will connect with or prospects at the right time.
When tracking a prospect’s actions taken based on our emails (what they open, what they clicked on, etc.), we additionally gain further insights into what’s on their mind and their most important decision-making factors. That allows us to customize our message and approach when prospecting to them in the future.
Alpha Delivered Brings Pre-Warmed IPs into Equation
Alpha Delivered is our service platform that will help you with a working email marketing strategy that transforms your prospects into customers. Get the most out of every lead from beginning to an end. and learn some valuable tips which will keep you on the right way to closing more sales. Set up the rules and let the power of automation do the work for you. Utilize our Alpha Delivered analytics and content dashboard to speed up your sales cycle, save valuable time, and assure optimal results.
Alpha Delivered is specifically designed to deliver your cold emails into your potential customers’ inbox. It accomplishes this by giving you access to pre-warmed IP address that has razor sharp reputation. Alpha Delivered allows you not to worry about long IP warm up process, enabling you to focus on what matters the most: driving appointments and sales.
Include Cold Calling in Your Sales Prospecting Strategies
The term “cold calling” is used extensively in sales prospecting, but what does it actually mean? Cold calling is the process of reaching out to potential customers who have not expressed interest in your product or service. This type of direct marketing allows businesses to reach out to potential customers who might not be aware of their products or services. It is usually done over the phone. The goal of cold calling is to generate interest in what you’re selling so that you can then follow up with a more targeted sales pitch to create new business opportunities. When done correctly, cold calling is one of the most effective sales prospecting techniques. Here is the right approach:
Research a prospect before calling
When you’re making cold calls, it’s important to remember that you’re talking to a real person. That may seem obvious, but a lot of people treat cold calling as if it’s just a numbers game – the more calls you make, the more leads you’ll acquire. That’s why they’ll say anything to try to get the sale without taking the time to find out anything about the person they’re speaking to. But if you take the time to research your prospect before making the call, you’ll be able to have a much more meaningful conversation and improve your chances of establishing long-term relationships with the call recipient. So, before dialing the number, ask yourself which one of your ideal customer profiles this business fits, what problems they are facing, how exactly your products or services can help them solve those problems, did they have a chance to work with your competitors, and much more.
Try to make a good first impression
When you make a cold call, you only have a few seconds to make an excellent first impression. That can be the difference between getting a lead and getting hung up on. The first impression you make should be professional, friendly, and helpful. Try to be as transparent as possible, speak slowly so they can understand you, and treat your potential customers as human beings. You want to sound like someone the lead would want to do business with. If you can do this, you’ll be more likely to get the lead to stay on the phone and listen to your pitch.
Don’t be pushy during your first call
One of the most important things to remember when cold calling is not to push the sale. It’s easy to get caught up in the moment and try to sell the person on your product or service, but this will only turn them off. If you come across as pushy, the person you’re talking to will be less likely to listen to what you have to say. Instead, focus on building a rapport and getting to know the person you’re talking to. Setting smaller goals will make them more likely to listen to what you have to say and consider doing business with you.
The only way you can polish your cold-calling skills is by making it an integral part of your sales routine. By making cold calls every day, you’ll see what works best and develop your own approach.
LinkedIn Social Media Platforms for Social Prospecting
Selling on Social Media is counter intuitive. While you need to have outbound activity portfolio, you also don’t want to appear desperate and pushy. Social selling is a form of art in an of itself. You need to give before receiving, so you will need to learn how to practice generosity on the social media platforms.
There are around 3.5 billion Social Media users in the world in 2019, as reported by We Are Social, which is almost half of the world’s population. That creates an excellent opportunity for you to connect with your targeted audience on any social platform.
You can utilize B2B Prospecting with Social Media in so many ways. Now, we are going to list some of the tips that we think are beneficial:
Business to Business Collaboration – We consider that interacting and making connections with other businesses can open the doors for collaborations. That can be mutually beneficial for getting in front of a new audience who may be interested in your products and services.
Targeting the Audience on LinkedIn – LinkedIn is an excellent platform for creating hyper-targeted campaigns for generating leads. According to Hubspot, it’s 277% more likely that LinkedIn will convert contacts into leads, than Twitter or Facebook. You can target users based on the industry, jobs, or other specific groups for more accurate targeting. You can use your LinkedIn to build a reputation and relationships and to increase ROI from targeting more qualified prospects.
Effective Facebook Ad Retargeting Funnel – Your warm audience is your hyper-responsive prospect. Consider spending a significant proportion of your advertising budget on these users because they are more likely to take your desired action. Besides, you should create several different ads that will target the same warm audience. Put each ad into its ad set and use the Frequency Cap feature, and you will be sure that people will see each ad once per week.
Inbound Strategies
An inbound marketing strategy can include many different channels and types of content for attracting prospects to your website. Utilize your prospecting tactics through blog content, social media ads, and email marketing. That is how your business will grow-by keeping marketing sales and service focused on how to help. Some of the best Inbound Marketing tools are:
- HubSpot Workflows
- HubSpot CRM
- Buffer
- Grammarly
- Google Analytics
- WordPress
While using inbound strategies to engage your audience, make sure to communicate and deal with leads and customers in a way that would make them want to build a long-term relationship with you. Also, it is crucial to invest time in learning the pros and cons of Hubspot vs WordPress so you could choose the platform that best fits your sales prospecting strategy.
You can create a solid lead score based on what’s in the profile of your customers by finding the person’s LinkedIn account. Also, the way you can speed up your inbound sales prospecting process is by setting up automated lead scoring. That can be crucial, especially for startups, because that way, you can determine which leads have the most engagement with your brand, and that can be qualified to move on to communication with the sales team.
Creating webinars is also one of the most effective B2B prospecting tactics you can use to enrich your sales process by generating high-quality leads and building connections with your target audience. And as having both a visually appealing and fully functional website is essential for the success of your inbound sales prospecting strategies, you should consider hiring a professional web design agency in Chicago.
Next Steps
Don’t have a sales prospecting strategy for following up with leads? Do not hesitate to set up a call with Alpha Efficiency experts so we can discuss and provide you with advanced B2B prospecting tactics that will help you empower your sales process and reach your leads at the best time.
