How to run a successful prospecting campaign? Plan and stages

Setting up a prospecting campaign can be a frustrating process, because there are so many parameters to consider. You need to establish your persona, choose your distribution channel, define your strategy, prepare your sales pitch…

Today, we’re going to make things a little easier for you by talking about this last point. Onwards and upwards! 🏎️

What is a prospecting campaign?

A prospecting campaign is a set of actions and strategies put in place by a company (or professional) to identify, contact and convert new potential customers (prospects) into active customers. 🔥

The objective? Broaden your customer base by reaching 🎯 people or companies who might be interested in your products or services.

This can be done through a variety of channels using different prospecting techniques, such as: 👇🏼

• Content marketing to attract and engage qualified prospects (via articles, white papers or webinars).
• Prospecting on social networks (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.).
• Sending targeted emails (cold emailing or email marketing).
• Cold calling.
• Online advertising (Google ads).
• Networking events.

To carry out a prospecting campaign, you’re going to need (as with any project) a plan! Don’t worry, we’ll help you draw up your prospecting plan. 😇

What is a prospecting plan?

Before you develop your plan, let’s understand what it is. 🤔
The prospecting plan will enable you to determine the structure of your business:

• How will you reach your goal?
• How profitable will you be? 💰
• How will you grow your revenues?

Thanks to a prospecting plan, for example, you’ll have a clear view 👀 of your business, and your teams will be able to understand the direction in which they need to move.

Roughly speaking, the prospecting plan is the set of actions you’ll put in place to attract your prospects and reach your objectives so that they convert at the end of your funnel.

Your prospecting plan will include è key steps: 🗝️

• 1️⃣ Define your goals.
• 2️⃣ Define your target.
• 3️⃣ Segmentation in your targets.
• 4️⃣ Choose your prospecting and distribution channel.
• 5️⃣ Prepare your prospecting campaigns.
• 6️⃣ Measure your KPIs and track your actions.
• 7️⃣ Convert and build loyalty.

Where will you find your prospects? How can you personalize and automate your approach to reach large volumes?

We’ll explain everything now! ⬇️

7 steps to a prospecting plan

The B2b prospecting plan will facilitate your sales 🤩, that’s undeniable. By doing so, you’ll eliminate a good number of obstacles and make your decision-making easier.

Let’s take a detailed look at how to make a prospecting plan. 🤔

1) Define your objectives

It sounds obvious, but it’s a crucial step. To know where you need to go, you need to define your objectives. You may have: 👇🏼

• Acquisition objectives: for example, you need to have X number of users of your product over an announced period.
• Traffic target: you want to reach 100,000 visitors to your site per month for year X.
• Sales targets: you want to achieve €X for year or month X.

By defining your goals, you give yourself a direction, and if you work as a team, you give your team a direction ️.

Why is it so important? 🤔

Well, it’s so that you can understand the issues facing your target audience. Your team (or just you, of course) will be able to find solutions and get the job done. ⛵️

Speaking of targets, now’s the time to talk about them too. 🗣️

2) Define your target

For us, there’s no room for argument: knowing your target 🎯 precisely means knowing their needs, their pain points, their frustrations, why they buy from you and not from a competitor.

Drawing a portrait of your ideal customer is part of your approach. 😇

This is also the time to think about customer loyalty. Knowing your target is a major asset in your strategy. And don’t forget targeting. 🎯

Yes, you can have a primary target, but you can also have an audience from elsewhere who will come and buy from you.

You can use all kinds of cool tools (some of them free) to use the portrait of your ideal lead.

For example: 👇🏼

• Userforge.
• Xtensio.
• Uxpressia.
• Illustrator (check out ❤️ for total freedom of persona creation).

There are, of course, others you can use, so it’s up to you to explore.

Next, you need to display: ⬇️

• First and last name.
• Age or age range.
• His or her place of residence or geographical area.
• Her sex.
• His marital situation 💒.
• Title and position in the company.
• His or her needs.
• His pain points or frustrations.
• How will your solution meet their needs?
• Why would she go to the competition instead of you?

There’s of course other relevant information you can put in (by the way, feel free to put in a photo so you have a visual representation of it), in that sense feel free to add anything that echoes your solution. 👀

3) Segment your targets

Perhaps you have a buyer persona related to a theme (like marketing, for example) and think 🧠 about its title (director, assistant, manager…). As you may have noticed, there are several branches within the same theme.

To explain, your new customers will have different tastes, the same desires and the same behaviors. Yet they’ll still be interested in your product or service.

You can therefore separate them on the basis of socio-demographic criteria 👨‍👩‍👦 according to :

• 🔵 Their social status.
• 🟣 Age.
• 🔵 Their profession.
• 🟣 Their income.
• 🔵 Of their activities.
• 🟣 Of their opinions.
• 🔵 Their lifestyle.
• 🟣 Their buying behavior 💰.
• 🔵 Loyalty (are your targets loyal to certain brands?).
• 🟣 How often they buy.

You can, of course, segment them according to your own criteria. 😇

Next, you’ll need to start making contact, one of the steps in the various prospecting actions.

4) Choose your prospecting and distribution channel

OK, so you’ve got your objectives and your personas, but which platform are you going to communicate on?

As mentioned above, there are a number of different prospecting channels to choose from. One of our favorites is LinkedIn!

Why? 🤔

With over a billion members, you’re spoilt for choice. 😇

But, doing sales prospecting by hand 🤚 takes so much time… And as they say, time is money.

So you need to think about the relevance of a free tool:

• How will he help you?
• What’s the budget 🤑 you’re willing to invest?

Of course, there are free or freemium tools available to get you started.

We’ve got one in mind for you: Waalaxy. 👽

We’ll come back to these features later in this article. 👀

You can also pay platforms (like Google Ads) to try and sell your products (you’ll need to activate your ⚙️ settings for targeting, habit, etc.). But you’ll have defined these criteria in your persona definition).

5) Prepare your prospecting campaigns

Now that you’ve put in place what we’ve seen above, you’ll need to think 🧠 about your prospecting conditions, which implies:

• 1️⃣ The message you’re going to send to your prospects.
• 2️⃣ The date on which you will send your message.
• 3️⃣ The tasks you need to perform.
• 4️⃣ The person in charge of a task.

In fact, you’ll simply create a document in which you’ll note down all the above points as well as the LinkedIn message you’re going to send to your leads.

6) Measure your KPIs and track your actions

Data isn’t something that many people like. Yet you’re going to have to get your hands dirty if you want to know if you’re still heading in the right direction. 🧭

So you’re going to have to analyze the various campaigns you’ve launched. There’s absolutely no point in analyzing your results the day after the campaign is launched. Measuring your performance 📏 lets you know whether your objectives were correctly defined and whether you’re on the right track to achieve them.

If you’ve exceeded your expectations, you can set yourself new targets, or continue to gain in growth and sales. 📈

Here is our list of KPIs to track: 👇🏼

• 🟣 Sales.
• 🔵 The number of new leads.
• 🟣 Prospects who have become customers.
• 🔵 Traffic to your site (if you have one).
• 🟣 Level of influence.

Once again, you can define your own KPIs.

7) Convert and build loyalty

Once you’ve got your prospects, you’ve got to get them to convert. So don’t neglect your prospecting funnel.

In your sales funnel, you’ll try to send the right message at the right time to the prospect who’s in one of the parts of this funnel.

The digital prospecting funnel allows you to transform the simple visitor into « promoter ».

It’s a marketing automation tool that allows you to (almost) automatically manage your various prospecting campaigns.

If a customer buys from you, but then goes straight to the competition, you have to ask yourself some questions. It’s imperative that you think about customer retention, so that your customers continue to buy from you and talk about you to others.

What is a prospecting file?

Obviously, we can’t talk about a prospecting campaign without mentioning the famous btob prospecting file. What’s a btob prospecting file? 🤔

In fact, it’s simply your document containing a list of your prospects (you could also call it a prospect database). This means you’ll have information about your potential customers. The information you’ll find can be :

• Last name, first name.
• An e-mail address.
• Socio-professional category.
• A telephone number.
• How he found out about your solution.
• The company he works for.
• Its business sector.

This sales prospecting file will enable you to approach them with the aim of getting them to convert 🤑 with you and represent your customer portfolio.

Don’t know what it looks like? Come on, just for your beautiful eyes 👀, we’ll show you.

B2b prospect file: example

To give you a clear idea, let’s say we want to create a B2b prospect file, we’ll enter the following information. 👇🏼

Categories	Examples
Company name	ABC Industrie
Type of company	Limited liability company (SARL)
Sector	Manufacture
Company address and zip code	123 Rue des Entrepreneurs, 75008
City	Paris
Phone number	01 23 45 67 89
Website	www.abcindustrie.fr
Decision-maker	Jean Dupont
Position held	Purchasing Manager
E-mail	jean.dupont@abcindustrie.fr
Company sales	2 500 000 €
Workforce	50-100
Manager	Marie Martin
Prospect interest	Need for an innovative production solution
How did he find the solution?	A recommendation from a partner
Customer brakes	Limited budget
How to satisfy the customer?	Propose a solution tailored to your budget with a personalized offer
Notes	Positive first contact, to be followed up in 2 weeks.

Now you can copy it and use it as you wish!

Well, to be totally transparent with you, creating prospect files by hand is extremely time-consuming and not really scalable… 👋🏽

Whereas if you use automation software, it can dramatically improve your prospecting speed! 🚀

Okay, but how does it work? 🤔

Well, we’ll tell you right now! 👇🏼

Why and how to use a tool for prospecting?

These days, there are a multitude of automation software packages, each with its own particularity, but our favorite remains Waalaxy, for its intuitive interface, ease of use and numerous nugget features. ✨

To give you a quick overview, Waalaxy is a Chrome extension that will help you get your active prospecting in the space off the ground if you’ve got the right practices in place.

It will allow you to : ⬇️

• Visit profiles on LinkedIn.
• Send invitations.
• Create personalized messages with Waami, the new AI assistant.
• Find and retrieve your prospects’ e-mail addresses.
• Synchronize your data with a CRM.
• Self-importing.
• Talk to the cat (we’re not talking about the animal 🐈 ) if there’s a problem.
• Take advantage of a comprehensive dashboard to keep an eye on your actions.
• Chat via Inbox (LinkedIn’s messaging system, only better).
• Launch e-mailing campaigns.

Okay, but how do you launch a prospecting campaign? Well, like this. ⬇️

1) Target your prospects

First step: LinkedIn:

• Double-click on the magnifying glass in the search bar to access all available contacts.
• Then sort by “People” and access the advanced search filters to add a keyword (such as the job title, in this case Fullstack Developer).

• To import the list of prospects, give your list a name and select « Validate » for import.
• Open Waalaxy and go to « Prospects ».

• You will find your list in the « Prospects section ».

2) Launch your campaign

You can now start your sales campaigns.

All you have to do is go to“Start a campaign“, and you’ll be presented with a whole host of possibilities! 😇

3) Personalize your prospecting message

Another Waalaxy feature that can save you time is its Waami writing assistant.

By mentioning the following elements, he will be able to write your prospecting message for you:

• 🔵 Target.
• 🔵 Value proposition.
• 🔵 Differentiating element.
• 🔵 Call to action.

If you’ve run out of ideas or just want to save time, this feature comes in handy! 😇

If you’d like to find out more about this tool, click the button! 👀

How about a recap?

As you can see, setting up a prospecting campaign and a prospecting plan are an integral part of your sales strategy. This action plan will enable you to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing strategy.

That’s why it’s essential to train it! 💪

So in this article, we’ve seen the definition of a prospecting plan, which is simply a document 📄 to structure your strategy.

Frequently asked questions

Psshiiit, I hear in the earpiece that we have a few more resources to share with you. 😇

How do you create a prospecting strategy?

For your sales development, you need a prospecting plan that gives you a vision of all your actions and helps you structure them.

But it’s not just for you. If you’re working with a sales team, your action plan will also help them know where they’re going. 😇

What are your prospecting methods?

Inbound marketing, which by the way means « inbound marketing » is a method of getting the customer to come to you. 🧲 Instead of soliciting them, you’ll arouse their curiosity through various levers such as :

• The white paper.
• Newsletters (mailing).
• Advertising.
• Social networking.
• Content strategy.

This last point is particularly interesting: content strategy. If you take a look ⛵ at the professional social network LinkedIn, you’ll see that there are lots of people writing posts on a wide variety of subjects.

In fact, by doing so, they write ✒️ in a subject in which they are experts. So they’re going to arouse the curiosity of people perhaps working in the same sector. They’ll create a community. Once their « » authority is established in their sector, customers will naturally gravitate towards them since they seem to know their subject.

That’s exactly what you need to do for an inbound marketing strategy.

You’ll gain confidence with each post you write, and your copywriting will improve dramatically! 🧑‍🚀

How to run a successful prospecting campaign?

If you’re wondering what prospecting is, we’ll give you the answers in this section. 👉 Quite simply, prospecting is looking for potential customers who might be interested in your solution. It’s an integral part of your sales approach.

There are, of course, several steps to doing this: 👇🏼

• Finding customers.
• Creation of a customer database with all their information.
• Find marketing actions to reach your customers.
• Set up your sales pitch.
• Build customer loyalty and continue to develop your customer portfolio.
• Analyze your various actions.

What’s the best way to prospect effectively on LinkedIn?

Over the past few years, social networks have become a big hit with Internet users. One in particular stands out as a professional network. We’re talking, of course, about LinkedIn. 🗣️

Initially designed to put professionals in a given sector in touch with each other, it is becoming increasingly popular for finding customers.

You can target job titles, prospect companies. 🔍 All this, just by typing in keywords related to your sales area.

Of course, you’ll need to develop trust with your customers, since LinkedIn is a platform based on trust.

The more complete your LinkedIn profile, the more topics that show your skills 🛠️ and the more discussions you have with members of this social network, the more likely you are to convert.

All that’s left is for you to get started and put everything you know about prospecting into practice. 🐉