We’ve all been there — only a couple of calls away from reaching your quota. There’s nothing as upsetting as missing your goal by that little.
You can deal with it and try and work a bit harder next month. Or you can use some extra effort and creativity to hop onto the last car with a few more leads.
Here are some fresh prospecting ideas for when you need to get those several meetings booked at the end of the month to stay on top of your sales objectives.
1. Follow up with OOO prospects
OOO replies can be a great source of additional information about a prospect, mostly a direct phone number or an alternative point of contact in the company.
The problem here is that those auto-replies in response to your outreach might stop your sequence, meaning they won’t receive any follow-ups.
To make sure none of these prospects falls through the cracks, create a two-step playbook to handle OOO replies:
- set up a separate sequence with a 2-week delay to follow up with the prospects once they are back in the office (and personalize those follow-ups or include additional touchpoints based on the info from the auto-reply).
- have a referral sequence running in parallel where you can add the contacts mentioned by the person who is currently OOO.
2. Make the most out of referrals
Referrals provide another amazing way to get a few more booked meetings quickly and easily.
For example, you can look up “connections of” on Sales Navigator to target connections of someone you personally know (of course, it’s best to let them know that you will be using their name in this case).
Or you can also reach out to the happy customers you’ve previously closed to ask for referrals — if you haven’t done that already. But hey, even if you have, maybe they have a new person to recommend?
Another creative tactic here is to intentionally build a list of non-decision-makers at the target account (entry/junior level employees in the relevant department) and contact them in the first place asking for the right person to talk to.
3. Reengage lost or stalled opportunities
Your CRM is a goldmine of sales opportunities. And I’m not talking about the prospects that are midway through your pipeline. I mean the prospects who have been closed/lost, stalled, or have simply ghosted you at some point.
Go through the recently lost opportunities and try to reengage them with a different approach. Pay attention to the reason why they dropped out of your pipeline before.
For example, if a prospect said that it was not the right time, you could check in a couple of months later to see if anything changed (and address any other sales objections they might have). Or maybe, you’ve added a feature that a prospect was lacking at that time? It also makes sense to reconnect with the prospect in case they have been promoted or switched to a different company.
4. Double down on active prospects
Another source of opportunities might be right there in front of you — the active sequences. You read that right! The fact that a person hasn’t yet responded to your outreach doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged. Many prospects might be reading your messages, forwarding them to other team members, clicking the links you share, or interacting with them in other ways. This clearly shows their interest (and intent).
In this case, it would be a good idea to put in some extra effort and try to engage those active prospects using hyper-personalized messages or visual prospecting. The latter definitely works, based on both our own experience and data aggregated from our platform.
5. Look for intent signals
Buyer intent is my favorite tool for building laser-focused prospect lists. This is what makes your cold outreach feel warm and deliver better results — exactly what is needed to get more leads into your pipeline!
One of my favorite intent signals is team growth (hiring). Namely, we have a sequence targeting companies currently looking to grow their SDR teams offering a more cost-effective way to scale their sales operations using our product.
Other intent signals you can employ are:
- Company growth through acquisition, funding, or geographic expansion
- New role/company (people often look to acquire new tools in the first 90 days in the role)
- Current tool stack — complementary or competing software they are using
- Website visits, especially if a person visits your pricing page
- Social media activity — the content they share (including their comments), mutual contacts, groups, etc.
These are some tactics that help us book a few extra prospect meetings every month. Use them at your own discretion and feel free to adjust them as you see fit.
For more prospecting tactics see the original post.
Or check out our webinar with Leadfeeder on 10 creative outreach plays to book more meetings
