The Best B2B Sales Prospecting Methods, Strategies, and Tools to Close More Deals
Tags: B2b Sales, Deals, B2b Prospects

The B2B sales prospecting process, while a shared source of anxiety for sales professionals, is the most crucial facet of selling for almost all businesses. Sales professionals often find themselves racing against the clock to meet quotas. In fact, 42% of sales professionals regard prospecting as the toughest stage of the entire sales process. Since sales are what makes or breaks a business, the exercise of reaching out to leads, nurturing them, and converting them into customers is more important than any stage that comes before or after it.

Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them. – Brian Tracy, CEO, Brian Tracy International

The process of prospecting unearths prospective customers, boosts a business’s sales pipeline, and provides a useful backdrop to forthcoming sales conversations. Yes, prospecting isn’t as exciting as closing a sale. In fact, most salespeople spend only a third of their regular workday talking to prospects. They spend 21% of the day composing mails, 17% feeding data, another 17% exploring and prospecting leads, 12% conducting internal meetings, and the remaining 12% planning calls. That’s why it is often left for the time when all the important things have been taken care of.

But if you don’t have a sales pipeline charged with highly convertible leads, you won’t be able to make any new sales.

That’s why it’s important to understand that prospecting is what kick starts the sales process and decides, to a large extent, if the deal is going to close or not. Sadly, not enough time is made for prospecting by sales reps as much as you would think was necessary. In fact, research by Gong found salespeople making more calls in the last month of a quarter than the first two, with the success rate of these zero-hour calls generally lower than other months.

This only goes to show how important it is to devote time to prospecting every day. The math is straightforward: the greater the number of prospects you amass, the higher the chances to close a deal you have, as every prospect amounts to an opportunity.

And while it’s the marketing department that’s been conventionally tasked with generating leads, it doesn’t mean that sales reps shouldn’t conduct their own research in regards to prospecting efforts. As such, salespeople still are very much a part of the tradition of self-prospecting and generating leads.

However, before we get cracking on the best ways to prospect, let’s take a look at B2B prospecting in general, what it is, and how the prospecting game has evolved in recent times.

What Is B2B Sales Prospecting?

Prospecting is the exercise of instigating and rearing new business by researching and looking for prospective customers for the products, solutions, or services that you provide. The goal of sales prospecting is to guide these leads or prospects along the sales funnel until the time when they convert into revenue-generating customers for you.

While the concept is simple, effective prospecting is difficult to execute. In fact, almost half of the sale time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. This happens because most sales reps are unaware that the buyer does their own bit of prospecting before making any contact with a sales representative.

In fact, according to CSO Insights, 45% of prospects admitted to having evaluated their needs beforehand to look for services on their own before making contact with the sales team. Additionally, almost all of the B2B buyers reported having researched online, while a little over half the buyers said that they turned to social media to look for fair and relevant solutions before making purchase decisions.

This paints a grim picture as it shows salespeople are losing their hold over the process of making sales. However, things are not as bad as they seem because the people you seek are actually seeking you. In fact, research shows that 91% of prospects would like to contact a sales representative in the early phases of their journey, including 34% of newer customers who are keener on engaging with salespeople early on.

Just think about it — how much more would you have been able to sell if you didn’t waste time on unproductive prospecting?

That’s why it’s necessary to identify customers fit for your business early while prospecting. This means looking for and curating those leads and prospects who actually need your product or solution to solve their issues. Take a look at the video below on steps to define the ideal customer profile for your B2B business.

After you have identified your ideal buyer, you, as a salesperson, can use everything in your arsenal to usher the sale and guide it through the right stages early in the customer journey.

How do you do that?

Well, you first need to be always present for the buyer when they need you. It is during the research and consideration stage that a large number of B2B buyers were found wanting to contact a sales representative. If you present yourself to prospective buyers here, it’s half the battle won because you were there when they needed you the most.

Conversely, you could also initiate contact as it was found that half of the buyers chose those vendors that contacted them first. Additionally, it was found that all sales representatives had to do was reach out to buyers first, with 85% of them saying “yes” to a meeting.

However, you need to always remember that leads will not just be driven to you like moths to a flame. You absolutely have to initiate action and be consistent about it for something to happen. In fact, the research found that 81.6% of the best-performing salespersons spend at least 4 hours or more each day on sales-related ventures.

Now that you are aware of the importance of commitment to prospecting, let’s take a look at the different methods of B2B sales prospecting.

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