Prospecting customers is essential for the development of your company. It is through it that you can increase your sales and, consequently, make your company grow and generate more profit.
According to HubSpot, 42% of salespeople consider prospecting for customers to be the hardest part of the job. This shows that, despite being extremely important, many teams are still not prepared to perform this function with excellence.
For this to happen, it is necessary to pass on training and skills to your team, thus ensuring that they are able to always carry out their activities in the best possible way and with the best tools and working conditions.
In order to offer you the best support and content, we have prepared a complete article with everything about customer prospecting.
What is customer prospecting
To avoid mistakes, you need to have a very clear understanding of everything about customer prospecting, so let’s start by talking about what it is.
Prospecting for new customers is the stage of the sales process where your sales team comes into contact with potential customers who are interested in your product or service.
At this time, sellers call the most qualified leads who have the greatest chance of closing a deal and who are at the end of their shopping journey, ready to receive a proposal.
As we mentioned in the introduction to this article, many sellers consider prospecting for new customers as the most difficult step in the entire sales process.
This can be explained by several factors, which will be addressed later in this text.
How important is it to prospect customers?
Conducting customer prospecting is one of the most important steps in your company’s sales process. It’s through her that you can find and direct prospects to the next stage of the sales funnel.
Without your team’s approach, these prospects may not contact your company and never move further down the sales funnel. It is important to remember that each customer may be at a different point in the purchase journey, and may be at the top, middle or bottom of the funnel.
Therefore, let’s quickly talk about each of the stages of the sales funnel so that you can better identify the moment of each one.
- Top of the funnel: At this stage, people have not yet discovered that they have a problem and it is unlikely that a direct sales approach will bring results. In this situation, it is interesting to present solutions to the client’s pain, making him discover that he has a problem and generate interest in solving it.
- Middle of the funnel: The middle is made up of customers who already know they have a problem and are looking for solutions to it. Your approach may be to introduce your product or service without trying to force the sale. The important thing is to pass on information to build trust in the client.
- Bottom of the funnel: The last stage is where customers who have already decided to close a deal are, here they may be analyzing proposals and options, so it is essential to show your product’s differential.
Customer prospecting steps
Now, let’s understand a little about the steps that are part of customer prospecting.
1- Research
The first moment of customer prospecting is to understand and know who the prospect you are going to approach is. It is extremely important that your team does an in-depth research on it, has all the information necessary to understand what the customer does, what their possible pains are and how your product can help remedy these pains.
2- Prospecting
Prospecting is the time to make the first contact with the customer. Usually, you will not meet with the person responsible for making the decisions and you will need to schedule more conversations until the deal is finalized.
3- Connection
This is the time to create a connection with the client, through meetings and other forms of contact. With this, you can reach the people who make decisions in the company and then start a more focused approach to closing the deal.
4- Education
The next step is to educate the client, that is, to present its solutions, its advantages and what it can do to help solve the client’s pain.
5- Closing the deal
Finally, the last step is to finally close the deal with the new customer. It is always important to be careful not to get ahead of any stage and miss an opportunity to close a deal.
Count with 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!