4 Tips for a Highly Effective Prospecting Strategy for Your Sales Team

If you’ve worked in Sales, you know that outbound prospecting can be a catch 22. It often gets put on the back burner because you spend the majority of your time and energy closing open opportunities… but here’s the catch, you still need a steady flow of qualified prospects coming into your pipeline.

For bigger organizations, you may have a dedicated team of Business Development Representatives (BDR) focused solely on outbound prospecting which takes the onus off of Sales. But whether or not you have a team of BDRs or individual Sales Reps responsible for prospecting, it’s important to work together to make your team's prospecting efforts more efficient.

Here are 4 ways you can make your team more efficient:

1) Start with your ideal customer profiles (ICP) to find their prospect audience

If you are in an organization that is already doing outbound sales, you most likely have ideal customer profiles (ICP) or personas lying around. These tools can be very effective in creating your strategy. If you can break your ICPs down by more qualifying characteristics such as job titles, years of experience, company size or industries then even better.

From here, the great thing about having a dedicated team to prospecting is you can slice and dice your ICPs to make each team member responsible for a specific niche. This gives them the experience and domain expertise they will need when prospecting to that audience. If you set your team up for success, they will see better results.

For example, one rep can specialize in prospecting C-suite executives in oil & gas while another can tackle companies with 50-100 employees in the technology sector.

2) Use geographical regions to your advantage

If your business can target larger regions such as North America or even global, you need to take advantage of splitting your efforts accordingly.

Think about this tactically - for example, if you have a sales rep who went to College in Minnesota, then he/she has contacts in the state, and might be able to use those relationships as a starting point for a selling relationship.

The more geographies your team can tackle, the better your opportunities are to make meaningful connections through your prospecting efforts.

3) Create attention-grabbing messaging

If you’re prospecting as a team, you will be sending a lot of messages and follow-ups. It’s extremely important to make sure your messaging is nailed down, or else you’re wasting everyone’s time. Prospects today have a tendency to turn their ‘blinders’ on when someone comes across too “salesy”.

The key is to create compelling messaging that draws attention and elicits a response. This may take a lot of trial and error, but that’s the great thing about having a team of people to test out different variations of messaging to see what works and what doesn’t. Take some advice from us here.

4) Manual prospecting is dead - use technology to save your team time

Once you have your ICP, geography and messaging set - all you have to do is reach out! Sounds easy right? Wrong. Many teams are still taking a manual approach to prospecting. Which means hours in email, on the phone and sending direct messages on LinkedIn.  

Technology can be a huge help in your prospecting efforts. Take advantage of team social selling tools that automate all of the above! List building, geography and messaging and follow-up reminders so that your team doesn’t miss anything. Spend more time closing and less time hunting without sacrificing the quality or volume of prospects.

Social selling can seem daunting, but the key is to find the right platform and mix of support for your team. Talk to us to learn how we’re helping teams drive their prospecting efforts through automation and helping them fill their pipeline.