For your company to be successful, it is important to find new leads and, in the future, convert them into customers. We call the process of actively finding customers customer prospecting.
This is a very common practice among companies and involves several steps, such as identifying the ideal customer for your company, knowing how and when to contact them, what is the best approach, and other steps.
If you want to know everything about customer prospecting and how to efficiently prospect new customers in just 5 steps, keep reading the article until the end!
What is customer prospecting?
Prospecting is looking for people who are in line with the company’s customer profile to present the brand’s solutions, establish a relationship with them and guide them along their buying journey so that the conversion happens and the sale is made.
That is, prospecting new customers means identifying the public’s needs and awakening interest in the solutions your company offers, in order to solve them.
In the topic below, find out how to prospect new customers.
Read more: How to create a persona in 3 steps
How to prospect new customers in 5 steps
Now that you already know what customer prospecting is, it’s time to understand how to prospect new customers for your company in just 5 steps, check out:
1- Know your products and services very well
For prospecting to happen, your salespeople need to know everything about the products and services that the company offers, after all, they need to sell this work to prospects.
It is important to have everything at your fingertips, however, remember that using ready-made phrases can have the opposite impact on a customer. They want to feel confident in who is selling the product and for that, they need to feel that they are in a conversation and not in a sales meeting.
Always studying and updating yourself is very important to be able to solve all the doubts that may arise and you will always find something new to talk about the product and convince the customer to close a deal with you.
2- Study the market
In addition to knowing very well about the product, it is important to understand the market where your company operates. Through this study you get insights about your company, such as seasonality periods, trends, changes and much more.
3- Discover the ideal client
Instead of calling several possible customers who don’t have the profile for your company, how about spending your salespeople’s time and effort only with those who are more likely to close a deal with you?
For this to happen, you need to do research to find out and understand what the ideal customer profile is for your company. With this in hand, you can identify where they are located, which social networks, what is the best way to approach them, what are the main doubts, etc.
Doing this screening before making contact saves time and money, in addition to increasing your chances of closing a deal.
4- Define the strategies that will be used
There are several strategies that can be used to prospect for new customers, defining which ones will be used is extremely important so that your company does not have to spend more on channels and actions that will not have a return.
It is better to invest in two or three forms of prospecting than having several and your team not being prepared to perform the service correctly. Some examples of very common customer prospecting strategies are:
- Content marketing: offering relevant content to prospects in exchange for their information and contact. With this data, you can carry out an analysis to see where this customer is in the purchase journey and, if it is already at the right time, get in touch.
- Social media: another way to prospect new customers is through social media. Some professional networks, such as LinkedIn, are better suited for this. You can track groups of topics related to your product and contact potential customers.
- Events: another great way to prospect new customers is to be present at fairs and events. In these places, networking is the main focus and you can meet and talk to several people who will be interested in your work.
5- Plan goals and objectives
Being able to measure your results is as important as getting in touch with the customers themselves. With defined goals, you can identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses, in addition to understanding whether or not that effort is paying off.
You need to define metrics and values that can be measured, so that you can measure your performance. For example, each salesperson needs to contact X prospects per day. Or, the target contracts per month is Y.
When these goals are not achieved, it is possible to analyze and understand where these bottlenecks are happening and getting in the way.
Learn more: Sales performance: how it works and what is its importance
Count on ASB Marketing to increase your sales
If you want to implement demand generation strategies in your business, it is of paramount importance to start with planning.
In this scenario, understand your audience, online behavior, preferences and, especially, make an analysis of your competitors and current demands of the market.
Then understand how your sales process works and what characteristics need to be changed to meet your ideal customer profile.
In addition, it is essential to keep in mind that demand generation does not only occur by paid media, on the contrary, inbound marketing actions (attraction marketing) and demand generation generate very advantageous results for organizations when well employed.
Finally, you can count on an experienced marketing and sales company to support the implementation of these strategies, such as ASB Marketing.
With the best innovative methodologies and tools, ASB Marketing finds its ideal customer and qualifies them through fully automated and personalized email cadence.
When the lead arrives at the purchase decision phase, we only passed on to your commercial team to close the negotiation. With this, we guarantee increased sales, reduction of trade cycle, cost optimization and support in long -term business expansion.
Do you want to know more? Go now and see how ASB Marketing can help your business!