+11 tips & best sales prospecting techniques to attract customers

Finding new customers is the sinews of war. 💥

But, between emails that go unanswered, calls that fall on deaf ears and increasingly fierce competition, prospecting effectively is a real challenge. 🦾

So here you are, looking for new techniques to improve your prospecting? ⚡ Just the thing, we’re unveiling the +10 best B2B sales prospecting tips and techniques to generate leads endlessly!

➡️ On the program:

• Different prospecting techniques,
• 5 tips for effective sales prospecting method,
• 6 best sales prospecting techniques and channels to use.

It’s over here. 👇

The different sales prospecting techniques

🏆 The success of your business depends on a combination of sales prospecting techniques and marketing/sales actions (carried out methodically and regularly) to maximize your chances of attracting prospects and converting them into customers.

Each technique helps to attract a greater number of potential customers, has its own advantages and can be adapted to suit your audience and your sales goals (non-exhaustive list):

• Traditional sales prospecting techniques 🎻: field, telephone prospecting, analog…
• Digital sales prospecting techniques 📲 (also known as lead generation or inbound marketing): networking, emailing, social networks, website, blog…
• ⚙️ Multichannel sales prospecting techniques that not only adapt to your audience and business, but also deliver better results and make it easier to reach your objectives.

You’ll decide which prospecting technique to use, or which to focus on in your prospecting campaigns, when you’ve clearly defined the prospecting plan and analyzed needs, objectives and budget. 💰

Finally, effective prospecting depends not only on the right sales prospecting techniques, but also on the method of prospecting and the tools used (which depend on the type of sales prospecting techniques and channels chosen).

5 tips for effective sales prospecting method

Sales prospecting aims to identify potential customers and convert them into buyers. 🤑 Not all prospects will become customers, but with the right sales prospecting methods and techniques to attract them, you can generate a maximum number of leads.

🛍️ With changing buying behaviors, it’s essential to adopt effective, more targeted and personalized sales prospecting methods to refine your strategy and maximize your impact.

We’ll give you a few tips for effective prospecting (and then explain the best sales prospecting techniques to adopt 😉 ).

1) Define objectives and target/ICP

Effective commercial prospecting is based on :

• 🎯 Define clear objectives that directly influence your actions and the way you structure your sales prospecting method. Objectives: generate more leads, shorten the sales cycle, improve prospect qualification…
• Identify, understand and qualify your ICP sales (Ideal Customer Profile). 👇🏼

Unlike simple marketing buyer personas, the ICP defines the ideal type of company or customer who will really benefit from your solution, based on precise criteria such as company size, business sector, bread points, budget…

🌟 Aligning your sales prospecting and lead generation with these profiles, allows you to generate quality sales leads, reduce conversion time while maximizing the conversion rate, as well as optimizing the return on investment of your campaigns.

To do this, it’s crucial to identify where your prospects are in the sales funnel: discovery, evaluation or decision-making? 🤔

Depending on their maturity, you can personalize and adapt your prospecting plan to perfectly meet their needs/expectations (notably through different sales prospecting techniques and different types of content distributed via different types of campaigns).

2) Building a sales prospecting plan

A well-structured 🗺️ prospecting plan is essential to optimize your prospecting efforts and avoid wasting time on pointless sales prospecting actions. With the multitude of digital tools, sales prospecting techniques and channels available, it’s easy to lose focus…

Once you’ve precisely defined your objectives as well as your KPIs and/or buyer personas, you can start building your prospecting plan. 🧱

Here are some additional tips to help you build a prospecting plan that converts more effectively and set you apart from the competition. 🚀 :

• Analyze unsuccessful bids.
• Structure the stages of your prospects’ sales journey.
• Plan prospecting scenarios adapted to each channel (email, social networks, telephone…).
• Select which sales prospecting techniques to adopt on each channel (messages, publications, lead magnet, landing page, articles, etc.) and how/why.
• Determine the number of sales leads to be obtained.
• Set up an organized prospecting schedule to structure your actions.
• Measure prospecting campaign KPIs and optimize lead follow-up.

We would like to emphasize a few crucial steps in creating a.👇🏼 prospecting plan.

3) Choosing prospecting channels and techniques

Selecting the right prospecting channels and techniques should be pretty straightforward if you’ve got it right ✅ : your target, your offer and your business objectives.

But to make sure you make the right choice, here’s our advice:

1. Audience analysis : Where are your prospects most active? LinkedIn is ideal for B2B, while email and the telephone (cold call) are still the best ways to approach prospects directly.
2. Choose the channel according to the buying cycle: A prospect in the discovery phase will respond better to educational content (blog, webinar), while a hot prospect will be more receptive to a personalized prospecting call or email.
3. Use multichannel and multiple sales prospecting techniques to maximize your impact.
4. Test and optimize: Experiment with different customer acquisition channels, analyze performance and adjust according to results.

The good news is that with the rise of new technologies and the prominence of social networks today, the opportunities to win customers are endless. ∞

So, whatever you choose, the key is to prioritize the channel or channels where you’re most likely to start a conversation and convert your prospects. 🤑

4) Sales pitch and campaign timing

A good sales pitch must be adapted to the channel used, the prospecting technique and the prospect’s level of maturity.

• LinkedIn and Emails 📩: Prioritize a relational, educational and personalized sales approach by providing value before proposing an exchange.
• Landing Pages and Events 🧲 must capture attention with a strong hook and promise as well as social proof (customer testimonial, quantified results, level of expertise…).
• Cold call 📞: Be direct and start with a trigger related to their business before introducing your questions and your offer, while remaining attentive to the prospect’s needs.

Once you’ve prepared your sales and marketing arguments (for each channel), you can launch and create your campaigns.

⏰ An element often overlooked: you need to determine the right timing, from launch on the one hand, and the time between your actions on the other. To achieve this, here are our tips:

• Analyze prospect interactions: Identify when they open your cold emails, reply to your messages or interact with your posts to adjust your timing.
• Observe their activity 🚨: Leverage buying signals (visits to your site, engagement on LinkedIn, content downloads…) to trigger your campaigns at the right time.
• Test and adjust : Experiment with different frequencies and times to identify when your prospects are most receptive.
• Respect strategic delays: Space your follow-ups from a few days to a week, depending on the channel used, to avoid saturation and keep the prospect’s attention without being intrusive.

⚠️ Test and adjust the frequency and structure of your campaigns (ideally multichannel), to maximize engagement and avoid fatigue.

5) Use the right prospecting and automation tools

Sales prospecting software is a tool that helps you find new prospects, and therefore save time through automation. 🔥

👽 Waalaxy is the perfect tool for combining email and LinkedIn sales prospecting techniques.

It is positioned as the simplest tool on the market, and can help you contact thousands of prospects continuously, generate leads, turn them into real customers and increase the number of sales… ✅ Thanks to all its features :

• Automatically target and import prospects (via CSV prospecting file, scraping techniques, a good LinkedIn search…),
• Segment, clean, sort and enrich your lists (or prospect database) with Waalaxy filters and the Email Finder,
• Launch multichannel prospecting campaigns automatically, selected from a template library with hundreds of automated multichannel action sequences,
• Automatically write, personalize and send your prospecting emails and messages (subject line, variables, text formatting options, save templates for reuse, insert images or videos, or voice notes…) so they’re optimized for conversion,
• Access Inbox, LinkedIn’s messaging system (in a better version) for efficient conversation management and better response/engagement management,
• Benefit from multiple resources for successful sales prospecting plan,
• Get automated tracking data on the performance of your campaigns, in real time.

You really don’t want to miss this. 👇🏼

⚙️ Other solutions exist, depending on your needs: either sales teams or sales professionals use specialized tools for a single channel, or others that offer a broader, multichannel approach. The key is to choose a tool adapted to your target and your sales prospecting strategy to maximize your impact.

🦾 In the next section, we’ll show you why Waalaxy really is the tool for you, and give you even more sales prospecting techniques you can use to :

• Build your prospecting database,
• Launch your LinkedIn, Email (and multichannel) prospecting campaigns,
• Listen and connect with your prospects,
• Prospect and measure the performance of your actions.

👇🏼

6 sales prospecting techniques to use

Beyond the sales prospecting method recommended to you, there are sales prospecting techniques specific to each prospecting channel that you need to know to be more effective and get more results from your prospecting campaigns 😉

Sales prospecting techniques #1: The prospect database

Before launching your prospecting campaign, you need to collect all your contacts in a prospecting database (whatever channel you choose). 🤲

It’s a structured list of your prospects’ essential information and contact details (name, company, position, email, telephone, sector… and any other necessary information), all of which must therefore correspond to your target audience.

And, also, a key asset 🔑 for organizing and optimizing your sales prospecting, by effectively targeting the most relevant contacts (avoid buying or renting them at all costs)!

So here are our tips for generating a database effortlessly and organizing it correctly to maximize your prospecting efficiency and avoid wasting time:

• 🤖 Automate data import , thanks in particular to the Waalaxy extension, which gives access to auto-import to retrieve contacts from LinkedIn automatically: from a search, your contacts, event participants, group members, people who have reacted to or commented on your publications…
• 🧼 Clean up and update your database (or prospect list) to avoid obsolete contacts, invalid addresses, duplicates, automatic mistargeting, etc.
• 📏 Segment contacts by dividing them into different lists according to precise criteria: sector, company size, maturity in the buying cycle, interaction history… This allows you to differentiate your campaigns, send ultra-personalized messages and optimize your conversion rate.
• 🏷️ Add tags and scores to qualify your prospects according to their engagement, behavior, or place in the sales tunnel to prioritize the most promising sales leads.
• 👀 Manage your lists to track prospects and synchronize sales actions, as well as campaign performance from your dashboard.

We can’t go into detail on every channel, but we will detail sales prospecting techniques to use on the best channels to use in B2B to get results: LinkedIn and Email.

#2 Sales prospecting techniques on LinkedIn

👤 LinkedIn is today an essential lever for B2B sales prospecting, thanks to its vast community and potential for generating qualified leads. 🌎 It offers the world’s largest free B2B database, ideal for targeting, finding and engaging new prospects effectively.

To maximize your results, once you’ve created your lists, we recommend combining several cold calling techniques:

• Social Selling 🛍️: Use social media to publish relevant, engaging content in a variety of formats (posts, newsletters, webinars, lives, podcasts, lead magnets…) to demonstrate your expertise and capture the attention of your audience. You can also promote your product or service offers and events to attract interested prospects. You can also repurpose them via message or other channels for lead nurturing.
• Networking 🔗 (a very popular method) to establish strategic connections with professionals in your sector or potential customers, by interacting through comments on publications and in groups. Waalaxy also lets you automatically send targeted invitations, visit profiles, request recommendations, personalized messages and emails…

LinkedIn prospecting techniques require patience and a well-honed sales prospecting strategy to turn your relationships into customers, but they pay off handsomely in the long run. 👀

What’s more, it’s possible to access the sales process via an automation tool, to save time while remaining relevant.

To take things a step further, integrate other channels into your sales prospecting method, such as forums, blogs and other social media… Wherever your prospects are actively looking for solutions. 💡

#3 Email sales prospecting techniques

📩 Email prospecting is a powerful lever that involves sending email campaigns to attract, generate and convert large numbers of leads.

Here are some strategic and engaging sales prospecting techniques to optimize your campaigns:

• ✍🏼 Master copywriting and structure: A good email is short, recognizable and solution-oriented. Take care of the subject line to maximize opening, adopt a conversational tone and end with a clear call to action (make an appointment, download, reply…).
• 💎 Adopt a marketing approach: Use automated sequences to nurture your prospects (lead nurturing) and alternate between added value and commercial proposition (with several types of email marketing).
• ♻️ Repurpose your content : Reuse your LinkedIn posts, webinars and newsletters, podcasts or articles to enrich your emails to bring value and lead the prospect to purchase.

At the end of the article, we explain the legal constraints surrounding cold emailing and the steps you’ll need to take to respect them in your campaigns. 🚨

Of course, there are sales prospecting techniques that apply regardless of the channel used. And, therefore, they are essential to know when launching a multichannel prospecting campaign.

#4 Multichannel sales prospecting techniques

🤩 Multi-channel prospecting involves multiplying points of contact and presence with a prospect via different sales channels (social networks, email, telephone, events, trade shows…) to exchange ideas and value.

The aim is to establish a relationship of trust by engaging in natural, relevant conversations rather than simply pitching an offer (more advice on this in the next section 😇) or pestering them.

Here’s what you need to do to succeed in your multichannel prospecting (whether for emails or messages):

• Carry out a market segmentation of the database beforehand, so that your e-mails can meet a single, precise objective.
• Diversify channels, content and techniques as much as possible to maximize the chances of conversion.
• Personalize messages or e-mails with variables, and start by giving advice before proposing a solution to your leads.
• Optimize follow-up and reminders : Plan several reminders, varying approaches and channels to capture attention without being intrusive.
• Improve your sales prospecting : Analyze your open, click and response rates to refine your sales approach and maximize engagement.

With Waalaxy, you can also strengthen your marketing funnel by running continuous multi-channel prospecting campaigns , so you’ll never run out of leads again. 🔥

Sales prospecting techniques #5: Connecting with prospects and customers

Talking to prospects in your sales pipeline and actively listening to them is the key to successful sales prospecting. 🫶🏼

💎 It’s not just a matter of exchanging ideas, but of adopting an expert posture in order to :

• Engage the conversation naturally and make it more human (open question, common interest, current events, recent publication…),
• Inspire confidence so that they express your prospects’ real problems and needs through the exchange of messages, e-mails and content (they’ll express them themselves directly), but also through interactions via social networks, forums, reviews, etc.
• Know them well enough to provide them with the right solution at the right time, or to position yourself differently (sharing strategic insights, providing additional value or content before proposing the offer…),
• Detect the “pain points“, weak signals, and sales triggers that indicate they’re ready to move forward,
• Reinforce trust and increase the chances of conversion when your solution is perceived as the most suitable.

By applying all these sales prospecting techniques, you’re bound to achieve lasting results, not only in terms of attracting and retaining your target, but also in terms of your sales performance. 👇🏼

Sales prospecting techniques #6: Measuring performance

Multichannel sales prospecting techniques or not, it’s essential to adopt a data-driven approach to track, measure performance and analyze results. 📊

In particular, with the following indicators (to be adapted according to your channels): email response & open rates, lead-to-customer conversion rates, engagement on LinkedIn, or sales cycle time…

By analyzing this data 👀 you can adjust your content prospecting strategy, optimize your actions, refine your targeting, improve your next campaigns, and therefore your return on investment.

👉 Now all you have to do is apply all the techniques in this article to maximize your results!

Conclusion: The 10 best sales prospecting techniques

Today, the opposition between traditional and digital prospecting is no longer relevant. ❌

The most effective sales prospecting method is to develop a good multichannel and hybrid sales strategy that combines these sales approaches, to achieve the highest level of personalization that will capture prospects’ attention (and fit your business). ✅

🏆 Of course, successful prospecting requires: good preparation (objectives, targeting and segmenting…), choosing the right sales prospecting techniques and using the right sales prospecting tools to maximize impact, optimize lead generation, acquire new customers and retain existing ones.

What’s more, now you know everything our Waalaxy automation tool can do to structure and optimize your actions, to develop your business and improve your sales prospecting process.

👽 Test it for free and move up a gear!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How to conduct commercial canvassing (in compliance with CNIL regulations)?

Commercial prospecting (email, SMS, telephone, mail…) is essential for building loyalty and attracting new customers, but it must respect certain rules. 👀

According to the Federal trade commission (FTC), prospects must be informed of any commercial prospecting (especially cold emailing ). 🚨 In addition, they must be able to give their consent and have the option of objecting (via a checkbox, link or unsubscribe form, for example).

Full details are available on their website.

Traditional prospecting channels and techniques

In addition to digital channels, traditional sales prospecting techniques 🎻 are techniques for generating qualified leads that remain effective to engage in more natural and relevant conversations :

• Face-to-face 🗣️ creates an authentic connection and a sense of trust with prospects, facilitating partnerships and positioning you as an industry leader. However, this sales prospecting approach requires time and availability to convince potential buyers face-to-face (door-to-door, appointments, events, product demos…).
• Cold calling 📞 although perceived as intrusive, is still widely used, as it facilitates human contact and remains powerful if well executed: precise targeting, appropriate tone, clear arguments and objection management. A personalized approach improves the chances of securing an appointment, even if the failure rate remains high. But be careful not to over-solicit or complain.
• Finally, analog methods combine field and telephone prospecting for a more human approach than automated digital campaigns.

That’s it, it’s up to you to apply the +11 best effective sales prospecting techniques and all best practices given in this article. See you soon! 👽