10 Prospecting Techniques to Attract Customers

Whether you are a beginner or an experienced salesperson, it is always interesting to discover new prospecting techniques that work. That’s why in this article, we’re going to discover the top 10 B2B prospecting techniques for generating leads! ⚡ Let’s go, follow me. 👇

10 Prospecting techniques to attract customers

Prospecting techniques meaning

Sales prospecting is about finding potential customers, people who, through their behavior or daily activities, could become future customers for your business. 💼 They are not yet customers, and they may never buy your product or service, but the best way to do this is to try to win them over with your offer. 🤩

Therefore, the lead generation stage is the pre-sales stage where the sales and marketing teams work together, to determine if the prospect can be interesting for your business. 🛒 Until you determine if these prospects have a specific need, then you need to continue to qualify them and tailor your offer according to their needs. 💯

Technique 1: The prospect database

Before launching your prospecting campaign, you need to collect all your contacts in a dedicated prospect database. 🤲

A lead database (also known as a lead file) ⚡ is a large directory containing a list of contacts. This contact list contains various information about the prospect, such as: prospect’s first and last name, age, gender, address, phone number, the name of the company they work for, and their position. 🔎

You are then free to add additional information to enrich the data. This information should be in line with your B2C goals. 🚀 However, for B2B target information, you can use: Company name, revenue, industry, potential contacts within the company. 🤠

👉 By grouping your prospects and concentrating them in one single file or a CRM tool (Waalaxy), you can define actions to find targetted approaches, even if it means bringing new arguments to old leads and refreshing your memory of past contacts. 🧠

Technique 2: The prospecting plan

Before starting your prospecting campaigns, you must define a precise prospecting plan. With the availability of new technologies and the abundance of social media, the opportunities to gain customers are endless. ♾️ However, you can easily get lost in this sea of profiles and spend a lot of time doing unnecessary tasks. 😣 That’s why you need to organize your leads like this:

• First, define your buyer personas well.
• Investigate which sales proposals have failed.
• Determine the sales steps that each prospect should follow.
• Plan prospecting scenarios for each mean of communication.

👉 Sales prospecting becomes a priority when the competition is high. Salespeople have to work hard to get leads. Here are some key tips for conducting effective sales prospecting:

• Follow the prospecting plan: set goals by deciding how many prospects to contact and which prospecting method to use.
• Create a prospecting calendar: Plan sales actions and prepare appointments. You need a good organization to boost your leads and attract new prospects. 💥

Technique 3: Field Prospecting

Field prospecting is a practical method of converting partners, suppliers or experts into prospects. Indeed, face-to-face meetings are an ideal opportunity to build effective relationships. 🤝

Your main goal should be to build trust and position yourself as a leader in your industry. This lead generation technique allows you to become familiar with the prospect. The goal is to find new partners. Start by giving advice before offering a solution to your leads. 💡

Link building requires high availability to attend the many events that prospects attend. Direct lead generation is an effective form of networking that allows you to discover new partnerships, maximizing your lead quantity. 💫

👉 This business method of lead generation is the best way to make a good impression and directly select your future leads. However, you have to spend a lot of time to convince your customers, but this means that it is very beneficial to find qualified leads directly.

Technique 4: Prospecting through networking

Networking is an effective way to do business prospecting. It is about building a network of potential customers. LinkedIn is a great professional social network that offers the opportunity to generate qualified leads. 👌

Networking on LinkedIn is a very popular method of business prospecting. 🔗 However, this requires persuasive communication strategies that include the following two steps:

• Build Connections: Building relationships is an essential step in increasing your chances of meeting new customers. The goal is to establish a connection with all levels of relationships. 🥇
• Join groups: Interaction plays an important role in any network. The goal is to reach out to all relevant LinkedIn groups that may be interested in your offerings and services. Your ability to respond to comments and shares from your followers builds your presence, allowing you to grow your relationships. 🤗

👉 However, this method of prospecting requires a lot of patience, but it can be very profitable in the long run. Especially, if you use automation software to speed up this process!

Technique 5: Digital prospecting

Digital prospecting is the set of marketing and commercial actions carried out with the help of tools available on the Internet (website, social networks, cold emailing, etc.). The company uses them to attract potential customers and then convert them into customers. This is also known as “lead generation” or “inbound marketing“. 🎯

To be effective, BtoB digital lead generation must be aligned with its “buyer persona“. Identifying their needs, evaluating solutions, making decisions, it is therefore about understanding where they are in the customer journey. Depending on where they are in the sales funnel, a personalized digital communication will be deployed to perfectly meet their needs and expectations. 🔥

Technique 6: Traditional Prospecting

Traditional prospecting could be described as old-fashioned lead generation, but it is far from being outdated, contrary to what one might think, even if new technologies have turned sales and marketing strategies upside down. It comes in several forms such as: telephone or field prospecting. 🌱

Let’s first mention cold calling, it is a tool still widely used by salespeople to find leads from databases (for free or paid). This is called “cold calling” because it’s an arduous exercise due to its high failure rate. 😓

So maybe in the end, the good old technique of on-the-ground prospecting is still the best way, in terms of B2B prospecting… Since, making an effort to meet a prospect seems much more human and useful than mass formatted emails or phone calls, which are often perceived as harassment or end up in the “spam” folder.

👉 Therefore, be careful with this type of communication and always remember to personalize the messages before sending, in order to properly prepare the ground for the sale!

Technique 7: Prospecting by email

Email prospecting involves sending emails to a large number of prospects on a purchased or rented database. This technique is effective in attracting prospects, but it is always done under certain conditions. Creating a prospecting email campaign can succeed if and only if: 👇

• You’ve segmented the database beforehand. Your message should have a unique and specific purpose. Therefore, a target segmentation must be done. 🧲 No one likes to receive messages from unknown companies, which do not interest you at all..
• You have a good copywriting: your content copy must be perfect for “cold emails” to be effective! Copywriting is the art of writing to get more reads and sales. You need to take a firm stance on this. 💪 People don’t have time to waste on useless reading… 🙄 So, you have to be creative and leave a mark.

👉 Don’t hesitate to send follow up messages too, if you don’t get a response on the first message sent!

Technique 8: Phone prospecting

Telephone prospecting consists of calling a B2B database that corresponds a priori to your target audience. 🏹 Baptized “Cold Call”, the telephone still stands out because it facilitates human contact. However, it is wise to adopt some basic rules for a successful approach: 🙏

• It is important to research the people you are calling to determine if they will be interested in your service or product.
• Phone communication should also be paced and clear. Using the right vocabulary and tone is also important. The tone is even more important than the words used in the exchange.
• You must learn to lead the conversation. Objections must be rebutted. You must know how to overcome obstacles, such as the first phone call. 🪜
• With the help of an AIDA marketing method, for example, you need to present your arguments and propose an appointment at the end of your exchange.

👉 Phone surveys are thus part of the traditional prospecting method. This is still true for most B2B or B2C companies, but cold calls need to be tailored in order to avoid frustration and complaints from targeted prospects.

Technique 9: Multi-channel prospecting

Multi-channel prospecting is a very effective prospecting technique that consists in multiplying contacts with the same prospect. You can chat on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn, or chat openly by phone or email. 🗣️

Being everywhere makes your prospects more trustful. 😇 Be careful, it’s not about harassing them on several social networks in order to “sales pitch” your product or solution to them. Contact them several times, mainly for the purpose of exchanging ideas. 😊 This multiplied communication can also be done on the same social network, but through different means, such as direct messages, comments left on posts, etc. ✍️

👉 LinkedIn Sales Navigator combined with our prospecting tool Waalaxy are perfect for this, since you can contact your prospects via InMail easily!

Technique 10: New Prospecting Methods

New prospecting media allow you to innovate your prospecting techniques and stand out from your competitors. For example, some salespeople use LinkedIn to find customers, since it’s a very good B2B and B2C lead generator. 🧨

To put it simply, your prospects are people like everyone else, and if at the end of the day or during their lunch break 🥗 they come across relevant posts on LinkedIn, which offer solutions to their daily problems, they will be interested. Besides LinkedIn, there are also discussion forums and blogs where you can talk about your area of expertise, and many prospects look for solutions there. 🧐

Buyer expectations and behavior have changed. As a result, there is a need to revisit methods to attract customers. 🎣 Here are some new sales techniques that are trending right now: “Social Selling” and “Growth Hacking“, these are techniques that will optimize your existing strategies to boost your lead acquisition. 🚀

👉 Using new prospecting methods also means adapting to the new media platforms they use to convey information. These include videos, stories, infographics, video conferencing or audio recordings. 👂

Conclusion: Prospecting Techniques

Today, the question of whether to use traditional prospecting methods or digital methods to improve your lead generation strategy is not what matters the most. 😮

Instead, the real issue is to develop a sales strategy with a higher degree of personalization that can give maximum attention to the messages sent, and to combine traditional and digital methods to optimize the existing methods. 💯

Sales prospecting is a very important step in developing business and improving the sales of companies. 🤑 For this, it is important to coordinate the strategies of acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones. Prospecting actually requires good preparation of the sales teams. 🏃

So, to get better results, it is important to define your goals, make the right targeting and choose the right “lead gen” technique to adopt. 🥰

What are the methods of prospecting in sales?

Sales prospecting is not always easy, but combine several prospecting techniques simultaneously to reach your goals easily. 🏈 Diversifying these marketing strategies can help you attract more potential customers, here are the prospecting techniques we have seen in this article:

• Field prospecting.
• Networking prospecting.
• Digital prospecting.
• Traditional prospecting.
• Prospecting by email.
• Telephone prospecting.
• Multi-channel prospecting.

Of course, this list of techniques is not exhaustive! 🤔 But with well-established sales techniques, your business will excel in its field. To sell effectively, you need to master basic sales strategies, be methodical, use the right tools, and know how to put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers. 🤗

👽 To make everything perfect, you also need to be able to automate certain tasks, thanks to software like Waalaxy, to create automated action sequences on LinkedIn and by email!

What are the best prospecting tools?

A sales prospecting tool is a software that helps salespeople find new prospects, whether they are B2B or B2C prospects. 🔥 Specifically, a prospecting software can help you to:

• Defining the main lines of the research,
• Targeting your potential customers,
• Finding the right leads,
• Filtering your database by prospect files,
• Follow the history of each contact with the prospect,
• Measure the campaigns sent,
• Personalize your prospecting messages,
• Generate qualified leads,
• Turn your prospects into customers,
• Increase your sales.
• And much more!

👇 The ways of prospecting that we have discussed in this article are:

• Using your prospect database correctly.
• Creating a prospecting plan.
• Using the new prospecting media.

👉 There you go, now you know everything that the Waalaxy automation tool can do to boost your prospecting, so don’t hesitate anymore and try it for free today!

FAQs: Prospecting Techniques

What is the most effective way of prospecting?

The most effective prospecting technique for acquiring customers is to take the time to listen to them. 👀 Listening means listening during a phone conversation, of course, but it also means listening on social media. 🧏 We now have great tools to “spy” on our prospects to understand their issues and identify their ” pain points “.

The “pain points” are actually triggers to reach out to these prospects to start a conversation and make the interaction more human, 🤖 it’s during these exchanges that you can introduce your business and offer your prospect to move forward with you if it makes sense for them. 🤩

How to make a good commercial prospecting (according to the GDPR regulations)?

Even if commercial prospecting (emails, SMS, phone, post, etc.) should help companies to retain their customers or attract new prospects, there are some rules to respect all the same to make a good commercial prospecting. 🧐

According to the provisions of the GDPR, prospecting by email is possible. However, prospects must be informed beforehand that it is a prospecting email. 📩 Moreover, individuals and professionals must give their consent and can oppose it via a box to be checked or unchecked in the email received.

What are the 2 types of prospecting in sales?

Also, there are two commercial prospecting techniques: traditional prospecting (phone, physical, etc.) and digital prospecting (email, social media networks, etc.). 🤓 Traditional prospecting techniques should not be ignored, as they are also effective.

In fact, they complement digital prospecting techniques. You need to decide which prospecting technique to use or focus on. Analyze the needs, goals and budget to define a clear prospecting plan. 💦

You can also strengthen your acquisition funnel by running long-term sales acquisition campaigns. Finally, consider hiring qualified staff for this. 💯

Great! You know the 10 most effective prospecting techniques to attract your customers, so go ahead and apply them. 😏