Five ways to instantly improve your prospecting results

Sometimes, you need your situation to improve instantly. You’re a busy person. You need results, and you don’t have time to wait.

Turning your steering wheel to avoid an oncoming cow on a country lane. Revamping your prospecting efforts to drive more leads. Being stuck on a desert island with mysterious howls coming from the treeline and no sign of food or fire. All require fast results.

If you are stranded on a desert island and looking for five things that could instantly improve your situation, for the love of god stop reading this post. Maybe build a fire? I have no idea.

If, on the other hand, you are struggling to get B2B leads and need five ways to instantly improve your email prospecting results, you are in the right place. You probably won’t get a tan while you read this, but at least you’re not talking to a volleyball called Wilson.

So, you have a product or service that answers your potential prospects pain points. Your sales reps are itching to pick up the phone and sell to those decision-makers.

Yet despite your high-quality product and finely tuned sales process, the sales team are sat there twiddling their thumbs. Your prospecting strategy isn’t delivering the goods, the sales pipeline has slowed to a trickle.

So here are five practical actions you can take that will instantly increase your results, and make your prospecting intelligent.

1. Reassess your market

Admit it, after reading that heading you’re already thinking about skipping ahead or giving up on this post entirely.

Of course you know who your customers are. You’ve probably been selling to them for years.

Indulge me in a quick mental exercise. Imagine for a moment that everyone in your business has developed mass amnesia. 

Think of your staff as Harold Bishop. This post is the rogue wave that washes you all out to sea, along with all memories of your customers.

Once you find yourself on terra firma once again, how would you discover who makes up your audience? 

Take a fresh look. Assume nothing. Dive into the data.

You probably won’t be knocked sideways. “You won’t believe it Jeff, turns out most of our Cornwall cupcake delivery revenue comes from Silicon Valley tech billionaires.”

However, you may find that you are able to refine your targeting. The effort is going to improve your prospecting results. And even if its only a 5% increase, it will be worth it.

Instead of actually pushing your colleagues off a cliff, creating buyer personas and ideal customer profiles can help, as you go through a formal process.

Confirm your targets’ locations, industries, and company sizes. Identify prospect job titles and keywords.

Once you’ve done that, build a market map. If you use our market mapping tool, you’ll get a segmented market breakdown in virtually no time.

2. Use the right data

You might have better targeting than a 14-year-old playing Call of Duty, but if your data isn’t up to scratch it won’t matter.

Studies show that we change roles once every three years on average. This means that after 18 months, only half of a database will be accurate.

The best solution (and the one we’ve chosen at sopro) is to not have a database at all, Instead of searching a database for the right people, search the world.

Switching your data source will instantly improve your prospecting results. You find the right people. Get their contact details. You verify their details. You prospect to them. And then, you sell to them.

3. Improve deliverability

I’ll tell you two things about email deliverability: it’s boring and it’s technical.

I’ll throw in a bonus fact: improving email deliverability is a surefire way of improving prospecting results.

So what should you aim for? This is the era of GDPR, spam filters, and promotions tabs. Email service providers are operating with a legacy of billions of junk emails.

So… 80%? That’s pretty good, right? Four out of five stars.

Well, if sopro had settled for 80%, our clients would have had 12,000 fewer leads last year.

To state the obvious, that’s a lot of leads. 

And the thing is, those 12,000 missing people – the difference between 80% and 95% – those are people who would have replied positively, but the email never reached them.

Thousands of potential clients, all trapped in spam filters. Never knowing how good it feels to be your client.

Maximise your existing prospecting efforts. Optimise your email deliverability. More eyeballs on your emails equal more ears for your sales team to whisper into.

4. Humanize your messaging

So you’ve tightened your targeting. You’ve sourced live data. You’ve upped your deliverability rate. Well done you.

But if you write emails that are as mass-produced as Coke cans then none of that matters.

Every person who receives your email should believe you sat there and typed it out personally. If they believe that, and their mothers taught them well, their good manners alone will make them reply.

Beyond good manners, they should be racing to reply because your personalised, brilliant email copywriting has won them over.

Two simple steps to improving prospecting results using content: informalised dynamic data insertion and chasers.

The describes the way we make emails sound personal at scale. We manually create informal alternatives for certain data points. 

It’s creating this natural language data that allows you to send personalised and conversational messages. You need the complex profile data underneath it for your precision targeting, but what the prospect sees is a chatty message from a human.

The second step in humanizing your message is to send chaser emails. Send follow up emails at the right time, with the right tone of voice. It adds to the impression you tapped out the message, and it massively increases your prospecting results.

5. Structure your sales team 

Our last tip for improving your prospecting results doesn’t actually involve the prospecting process.

Get your sales team to focus on what they do best. Pitching, proposing and closing.

How do you do this? Well, we’ve previously covered creating a sales enablement strategy in detail. (You can also create a buyer enablement strategy – and come at the problem from both sides).

But one simple way: fix your prospecting so the sales team don’t have to do it. (Or contact us, and we’ll do it for you.)

But even if your sales team are selling 100% of the time, there’s a chance they may not be able to handle the number of leads they get.

This will sound like a humblebrag, but one of Sopro’s top reasons for customer churn is that we deliver too many leads for some sales teams.

What do you do if you can’t sell to all the leads? Just don’t sell to all of them. 

Sell to the ones that are going to become customers. Circle back to the work you did in reassessing your market. Score your leads. Focus on the ones that are most likely to close.

Make sure your team are structured well. Make sure they are primed and ready to sell.

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If you follow all these pointers and still can’t get close to our campaign stats, get in touch and we’ll deliver great prospecting for you.