The Top Prospecting Methods (According to Your Buyers)
Mike Schultz, President of RAIN Group
Prospecting is hard, but is a critical part of most sellers’ jobs. You need to constantly be looking for the next sale, feeding the front of the pipeline, and leading successful sales meetings. What, then, works in prospecting today? How can sellers become more productive in their prospecting efforts?
We asked 488 buyers how they prefer to be contacted by sellers and how sellers have actually attempted to connect with them. In our results, we found that buyers prefer to be contacted via email, and that sellers are reaching out to them over email. So, you should focus 100% of your time on email prospecting, right?
I urge you to think twice. Any individual method on its own is unlikely to work very well. The prospecting power comes when you combine methods and build attraction campaigns using multiple tactics and reaching out to buyers using multiple ways over time. Using multiple media is one of the five appointment-setting keys to success.
Break Through Using Multiple Methods
Think about how powerful multiple tactics are when they work together.
Imagine you’ve targeted a few hundred buyers with whom you want to share new research that your company just conducted for their industry. You send an initial email, and customize that email based on actual information about that company and research you do on LinkedIn. You follow up with a phone call, and you leave a voicemail.
A few days later, you haven’t heard back so you resend the initial email, make another call, and leave another voicemail. You also send a LinkedIn request, letting them know you’ve been trying to get in touch to share some relevant new research. Maybe you even print the research findings and drop them in the mail with a personal note.
At this point, it’s entirely reasonable that the buyer has not responded — many never do. But a few buyers are going to open that email, listen to the voicemail, see the LinkedIn message, or open the research you sent via snail mail, and they’re going to want to meet.
Breaking through the clutter takes hard work, but it can be done.
To read the complete article, The Top Prospecting Methods (According to Your Buyers), visit Quotable.com.
