Creative prospecting ideas for 2024

Revolutionise your outreach with creative prospecting strategies! Unleash innovation for unparalleled business growth.

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For any business, mastering the art of prospecting is a game-changer. Whether you’re a seasoned sales professional or a budding start-up enthusiast, the effectiveness of your outreach strategies can make or break your success. 

In this digital age, where information overload is the norm, standing out amidst increasing competition requires a touch of creativity. It’s good practice to step out of your usual routine to stand out from the crowd. Explore innovative and imaginative approaches to prospecting and uncover the untapped potential of unconventional outreach methods. 

Think outside the box with a blend of creativity and strategy. And if you need a little inspiration, below are some of our favourite ways to prospect with a twist.

Up your game with multi-channel outreach

As we enter 2024, the business landscape brings challenges and opportunities. With this in mind, you must level up your sales prospecting process. And first up, don’t just make the most of email or cold-calling. Instead, be present across multiple platforms.

Multi-channel prospecting allows you to connect with your audience in several places to enhance the effectiveness of your reach. Then, using creative campaigns – like the ideas listed in this post – you can easily attract the attention of buyers looking to solve a problem.

But before we head into the whacky and wonderful, let’s dig into those traditional avenues and how you might be able to level them up. 

You might have made the most of email, phone calls, and LinkedIn. But once you can’t improve them any further, try combining them.

Rather than just using email or LinkedIn InMail alone, our service combines the two. This synchronised approach helps our clients stand out. Talking to prospects on multiple platforms makes brands more memorable.

And then we add to that base by layering more creative ideas to stand out further. Let’s get into it.

Corporate gifting

From a cup of coffee to something a little more fancy – like a bottle of champagne – corporate gifting is an innovative way to prospect, adding a little happiness along the way. 

Easily integrated into your email outreach, it’s a strategy that leverages the reciprocity principle. Making the most of gifting can inspire recipients to engage with you more positively and add perceived value to the interaction. 

Trust us, it’s a form of outreach we’ve already made the most of. It’s a great tactic when targeting high-value accounts; the payoff speaks for itself. Leads generated from gifting campaigns saw an increase of 36.1% in positive responses – a prospect jumping on a sales call with one of our clients. 

Not only that, but the gift redemption rate stood at just 0.15% – highlighting that the gifts saw the desired effect of more booked meetings, even where people didn’t redeem the gifts.

It doesn’t have to all be about fancy gifts either! Offer to plant a tree on someone’s behalf; not only does everyone win, but so does the planet. 

Warm calling

It’s a little chilly in here! Gone are the days of cold calling. Let’s welcome the golden rays of warm calling into your prospecting strategy. With the success rate of cold calls at around 1-2%, you can level up your phone game with some intent tracking. 

By tracking user intent – from what a buyer looks at on your website or across social media – you can quickly identify where they might be within their customer journey and leverage that intelligence to improve results. 

Drop in with a call and answer queries, provide additional information and clearly outline why your product is leagues ahead of the competition. Timing is everything.

And it works! By examining client campaigns with over 100 calls logged, we found that 8% of intent-based warm calls resulted in a booked sales meeting – quite the step up from that cold 1-2%. Simple to implement and effective, it’s a great way to strengthen your strategy without disrupting what your sales team might be used to. 

Personalised landing pages 

The power of personalisation is not to be glossed over. Personalised landing pages need to be standard practice within your strategy. If you haven’t already, defining your buyer personas will help you with this and will allow you to create a series of pages based on those individual characteristics. 

If you click on a link in a Sopro email, you’ll arrive at a fully personalised page. From switching up the copy, bringing in personalised calls to action buttons, and even adding in a nifty personalised video can go a long way in boosting those conversion rates.

Hyper-personalised direct mail

You heard it here first: direct mail is making a comeback. Nailing personalisation in your prospecting is integral, and direct mail is a good fit. 

As we’ve already mentioned, and you’ve most likely already experienced it, it’s getting increasingly more challenging to stand out in this digital world. So, let’s go offline for a minute. In a surprising turn of events, direct mail has been making a return, with 18% of companies saying they would be happy to be contacted by post. This has more than doubled since 2023!

With many more of us craving a human approach, strike while the iron is hot with personalised letters. It makes a memorable first impression, setting you up nicely to reach out in the digital world. 

We don’t like to brag, but hey, you guessed it – of course, we tried and tested it ourselves! Buyers who received personalised letters were 23% more likely to open an email than those who hadn’t received anything beforehand. We’ll take that as a prospecting win. 

Laser-targeted social media ads

B2B targeting is already tricky in the land of Meta, with ads being served to a broader audience, having a reduced impact on qualified leads. However, here at Sopro, we’ve figured out how you can get a little more creative with your social media to level up your prospecting efforts. 

In partnership with Clearbit, we’ve added a pretty important feature to our internal campaigns. This lets us directly match your prospecting audience onto platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google Display Network. It makes the paid social game highly targeted, reaching those key decision-makers in the right place at the right time – and a more worthy investment.

Offer free consulting or coaching sessions

There’s nothing quite like thought leadership prowess to appeal to your customer base and enrich your sales prospecting technique. From targeted coaching sessions to hosting your own workshop, highlighting your expertise is a great way to increase conversions. 

Let’s talk about those targeted coaching sessions. From the data you already have, whether that’s from intent tracking or your CRM, identify key prospects who would benefit from your knowledge – make yourself valuable to them. It instils trust and highlights that you know exactly what you’re doing regarding problem-solving.

Want to save time? Forget about one-to-one consulting and offer group workshops. Demonstrate your aptitude whilst generating a hive mind from everyone involved. It’s also a great chance to share resources and demonstrate your expertise. Be sure to follow up with a thank you email with some of those assets!

Personalised images and video

Master the art of hyper-personalisation in your prospecting outreach with something a little different. Combining clever tech and prospect data allows you to create personalised images for a fun and distinctive touch. It can sit alongside your current outreach strategy and complement email and LinkedIn.

Image data enrichment can include first name, job title, brand logos, a website screenshot, and more. It makes outreach more interactive, elevates the buying experience and levels up your prospecting channels.

Picture your sales reps with a funky little speech bubble – you just know that it will capture buyers’ attention in a much more unique way, keeping your business top of mind.

Here’s one Craig from our sales team sent out to his prospects:

The same goes for video! 

Being increasingly adopted, creating an original video is a new way of reaching prospects. It’s also easy and quick to send via those channels you are already using. 

It’s become an innovative way to problem-solve and stand out to your prospects, so why not go the extra mile with text and voice interaction? It allows you to break through the noise in style. And it drives results. According to  Salesloft, video prospecting has seen a 16% increase in open rates and a 26% increase in responses. 

Cameo for business

Take your prospecting to the stars and get a well-known face involved. Strengthen your engagement and see an uptake in sales with videos that will create quite a stir.

A creative advantage, harnessing a well-known platform like Cameo, brings relatability and something a little different. Leverage the power of celebrity and get a voice from The Apprentice or The Office, or choose a wild card viral social media sensation. 

This is a really fun and creative way to stand out when prospecting. It can be used across social media, as a surprise and delight in emails, as part of a more comprehensive multi-channel campaign, and most importantly, it can be delivered across the sales funnel. 

AR business cards

Not just any old business card, let us tell you! Utilise the wild world of augmented reality to reach out to new prospects in an engaging and exciting way. Not only does it highlight your name, position and credentials, but guess what? It can be used across your multi-channel prospecting campaign. And that’s not all.

You can integrate demos on your products or services. You can add in a little social proof, whether customer ratings or awards. Or you can get creative by adding avatars. Have fun with it and connect with prospects in a whole new way.

Using a tool such as this can increase your visibility, help you stand out among the competition, enhance the customer experience, and build the foundation of those relationships in a new and refreshing way. 

Leverage creativity to stand out

With traditional methods of prospecting becoming overcrowded and, frankly, outdated, the game-changer is clear: creative strategies! From harnessing the power of multi-channel to innovative tactics like gifting and AR business cards, there are plenty of ways in which you can elevate your outreach game. 

At Sopro, we’ve been revolutionising prospecting for eight years. And we’re constantly testing new strategies and prospecting technologies. Anything to help you stand out from the masses and secure those virtual meetings. In the year ahead, we’ll be rolling out even more new features into our campaigns to help you stay ahead.

Welcome to the prospecting revolution, where creativity reigns supreme!