Sales Prospecting Best Practices
Posted by Robert Hennessey on Wed, Feb 22, 2012
In today’s "no-contact society”, small business owners may find sales prospecting more challenging than ever, here are 5 sales prospecting best practices tips. With caller ID and voicemail, the telephone has lost its prominence as a valid sales prospecting tool. Direct mail used to be helpful for B2B sales prospecting, but too much “junk mail” and ever-increasing postage costs have rendered this option less desirable. It is harder to advertise directly to an exact target audience with today’s satellite radio and television markets. So what can you do to generate small business B2B sales prospects? Here a few best practice tips that might help:
1. Be where your sales prospects are: If you have a clearly defined target market, chances are your sales prospects are gathering at some type of business conference, seminar or trade associations. Join the associations if possible, attend local and regional trade shows, or offer to speak at these events. This gets you face-to-face with your target audience of sales prospects that can make buying decisions on your product or service.
2. Offer knowledge they do not have: You know something that can help your sales prospects save time, save money, solve a small business problem, or run their business more efficiently. Find a way to offer a “free sample” of your expertise as part of your sales prospecting plan. If you have technical knowledge, offer a white paper on your website. If you sell computers, you could offer to analyze their current system and make recommendations for efficiency improvements. If you are an accountant, you could offer a review of their accounting or bookkeeping system.
3. Make time for sales prospecting: Of course, you are busy enough just running your business, but the best time to prospect for new business is not when business is slow. In fact, that is the worst time to be sales prospecting. You need to be proactively generating new business leads constantly in your pipeline everyday. If you are a very small business, you should be spending at least 40% of your time prospecting for new business. If prospecting sales is not your forte, then you may want to consider outsourcing marketing to a professional that will market your business everyday.
4. Become an Expert: There are many ways to get your name out with today’s communication abilities. Start a newsletter, write a blog, build a strong online profile, or write articles for industry publications, just get your name or your company’s name consistently in front of your small business sales prospects. You do not even have to do all the work yourself. Many online services can take your ideas, write copy for you, manage your e-marketing and handle your public relations. Once they start seeing your name everywhere, sales prospects will be more likely to respond to your small business B2B marketing efforts.
5. Make It Easy for Them to Find You: Part of your small business sales prospecting plan should be to make sure, that prospects who may not be on your radar can still easily find you when they have a need for your product or service. That means taking full advantage of everything that the internet and search engine marketing have to offer. Think of all of the keyword phrases your sales lead prospects might use to search for your services using Google, Bing, Yahoo! or other search engines. Type those keyword phrases into several search engines and see how you rank. If you are not on the first page, you have to pump up search engine optimization on your website. Implement a social media inbound marketing campaign on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites to drive more quality traffic to your website.
Takeaway
Small business sales prospecting may have gotten more difficult, but you can use these best practices to make it affordable and successful again.
