Prospecting is the process of researching and pursuing potential customers for your business. It’s a vital part of any sales strategy because it helps develop your sales pipeline and brings you one step closer to securing new customers.
The most important part of prospecting isn’t simply finding names and emails — it’s the time and effort spent identifying potential customers and making sure that they’re actually a good fit. When done right, prospecting doesn’t just pump leads into your pipeline; it pumps qualified leads into your pipeline.
In this guide, we’ll cover different prospecting tactics — including tips on how to identify and qualify leads more quickly and efficiently — that will have you closing more deals in no time.
The top 10 sales prospecting tactics
- Find a balance between inbound and outbound prospecting
- Create your ideal customer profile
- Implement account-based sales to target the right accounts
- Use sales prospecting tools to find high-quality leads
- Leverage intent data to qualify leads
- Personalize your outreach
- Automate manual tasks
- Tap into social media
- Use referrals to your advantage
- Stay organized
1. Find a balance between inbound and outbound prospecting
There are two main prospecting methods used by sales reps to generate leads and prospects: outbound and inbound.
Outbound prospecting is a process in which sales professionals proactively search for, identify and reach out to prospects. The ultimate goal is to introduce prospects into the sales cycle and convert them into customers. (It’s also known as “cold outreach.”)
Inbound prospecting relies on marketing efforts to drive action or engagement from prospects. For this kind of sales prospecting, the marketing team will track who engaged with your company’s website or content and pass the information on to the sales team. Sales reps will then make contact and, ideally, convert those leads into paying customers.
While this article will primarily focus on outbound prospecting tactics, a combination of both inbound and outbound prospecting is often the best strategy because they’re both powerful methods in their own ways.
2. Create your ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile is defined as the type of company that’s a perfect fit for your solution. They’re the most likely to buy and continue to use your product, which makes them extremely important for business growth.
Your ICP should focus on the shared characteristics of your target accounts, such as:
- Industry
- Location
- Employee headcount
- Pain points
- Budget
Once you’ve created a list of your top accounts, look for patterns. You might notice the companies are a similar size or concentrated in a particular region — meaning these metrics could be important factors to include in your ICP.
3. Implement account-based sales to target the right accounts
Account-based sales enables you to focus on quality accounts over quantity. With ABS, sales teams first find specific accounts that match their ICP, and then identify the right contacts within those accounts. They reach out to those contacts with personalized messages to guide them through the sales funnel until they ultimately become customers.
The goal of ABS is to generate more revenue from fewer accounts by better aligning the sales process with the needs and buying behavior of different organizations. Some benefits of ABS include increased focus on key accounts, reduced customer acquisition cost, and a larger average deal size. This type of selling is often used in B2B sales, but it can be used in B2C sales as well.
Crunchbase’s account-based prospecting tools can help you find new companies that are the right fit, so you don’t waste time on deals that will never close. Customize these pre-built lists to get started with ABS:
- Series B Companies with > 100 Employees in the Healthcare Industry
- Personal Finance Companies Based in India with > 500 employees
- SaaS Companies Based in San Francisco and Funded in the Last Year
4. Use sales prospecting tools to find high-quality leads
The right sales prospecting tools can save you time, help you build relationships with prospective customers, and help uncover more leads. One example of an all-in-one prospecting tool is Crunchbase, which makes it easy to find leads at scale, including:
- Advanced search: Conduct granular searches to help identify companies that match your ICP. You can search by location, number of employees, last funding round and more.
- Similar companies: Discover new leads that resemble your recently closed deals with company recommendations tailored to you and based on your preferences, lists and activity within Crunchbase.
- Alerts: Follow potential leads to receive email alerts when a company raises money, makes headlines or hires new leadership.
Generally speaking, you’ll want to use a sales prospecting tool that helps you identify high-quality leads, prioritize those leads, find accurate contact data, and reach out to them to close deals.
5. Leverage intent data to qualify leads
It’s important to focus on the most qualified leads who have the best chances of converting to buyers. Buyer intent can help you measure a prospect’s inclination to purchase a product or service, and accurately assessing buyer intent can help you reach out to prospects at the right time.
You can gauge buyer intent using factors like buy signals and intent data. Buy signals, or events such as new funding raised, changes in leadership and new product launches can indicate that a company has purchasing power, while intent data like a prospect visiting your website can help you gauge just how interested in your product they are.
Buy signals and intent data can help you connect with the right prospects at the right time with the right message, allowing you to build authentic relationships and boost your sales over time.
Tip: You can find intent data on Crunchbase via Bombora within advanced search to discover when prospects have buying power.
6. Personalize your outreach
Personalization is key to standing out in a crowd of generic sales pitches — you’ll have a much better chance of converting prospects if you tailor your messaging to their needs. Personalizing your outreach is also a great way to make your prospects feel valued and can, on average, increase your reply rates by 17%.
Including unique information about your prospect is a great way to make an email more personalized. You can congratulate them on a recent funding round or new position, or compliment them on a recent article or LinkedIn post they wrote. This will signal to your prospect that first, you are a real person, and second, that you have done enough research to know who they are. This can be the difference between a reply and your message being sent to the trash can.
7. Automate manual tasks
Combing through multiple tabs to find leads and manually entering data into your CRM can be monotonous, but you can save time and reduce frustration by automating some of these more tedious manual sales tasks. Sales automation uses software, artificial intelligence or other digital tools to automate these tasks and make it easier for sales teams to focus on building relationships, nurturing leads and closing deals.
Sales automation tools allow you to:
- Instantly verify contact data
- Quickly identify key decision-makers and influencers
- Easily discover and qualify accounts
- Create personalized emails customized to your prospects
- Find qualified leads in your territory
- Build a list of similar companies you can target
The more redundant and administrative-type tasks you can streamline, the more time you’ll have to engage with prospects and guide them toward a sale.
8. Tap into social media
You may have heard about social selling or social prospecting, which is the process of using social media to research, identify and engage with prospects. Social media might not be the first tool you associate with sales prospecting, but it can pay off in a big way. According to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report, top-performing sales reps consider social networking channels to be “very important” to their success.
When used correctly, social media can help you connect with potential prospects. LinkedIn is a particularly powerful tool for social selling. A few ways to leverage the platform include:
- Gather insights about your prospects based on their social media posts that can help you further personalize your outreach
- Use the alumni search tool to get a list of prospects who attended the same school as you
- Join LinkedIn groups to contribute to conversations with like-minded professionals and potential clients in need of your services
9. Use referrals to your advantage
Research by Nielsen found that 92% of buyers trust referrals from people they know, meaning you should absolutely be leveraging referrals as part of your prospecting strategy.
Because happy customers will tell others good things about your business, the best time to ask a client for a referral is after the sale is made and the experience is still fresh in their mind. You can even build this into your regular sales process by setting a reminder for yourself to follow up with your new customer a few days or weeks after making a sale.
It’s also important to stay in touch with customers you may have not spoken to in a while to ensure that they are still happy with your product or service (and therefore may be willing to refer you to someone within their own network). You can do this by inviting them to events, sharing whitepapers and other content, or simply setting up a meeting. This way, you’ll stay top of mind.
10. Stay organized
Managing every lead and prospect that comes your way can be tricky. You may have a hard time tracking your contacts and organizing and finding customer data. A good CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot can help you prioritize follow-up messages and tasks according to where leads are in the pipeline.
Tip: Crunchbase’s shared tags feature is useful for tracking and prioritizing your contacts so you can easily understand which accounts are the most important. You can also use the shared notes feature to store information about previous interactions to inform future outreach and prioritize prospects.
