17 Jul

2022

Practical guide to Sales Prospecting and Prospecting Automation

“Prospecting - Find the man with the problem” - Benjamin Friedman

They say, Prospecting is the real mantra for a business to achieve sustained success. Continuous prospecting ensures that any business doesn’t remain in a dormant state. But how? An attractive marketing campaign in any business will only work if the target audience are the ones who are likely to convert into potential customers. However effective the business strategy, if it doesn’t cater to the desired prospects - the ones who will benefit from your product - it is bound to fail.

Therefore, it is essential that before the commencement of marketing and sales, you have a list of leads/prospects who are your potential customers in the future.

What is Sales Prospecting?

• Sales Prospecting is the process of finding potential buyers, leads, or clients for your business.
• Identifying prospects for your business, collating their information and creating a database of these prospects or leads for future communication is defined as prospecting in Sales.
• Sales Prospecting is done to verify and check whether the target audience is the desired audience and a right fit to the products/services the business serves.

Steps to an ideal Sales Prospecting process

• Step 1 : Creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
• To start with, the initial brainstorming that has to happen within the marketing, Sales and Leadership team is to paint a picture of their ideal prospects in their minds. Identifying the correct target who is most likely to buy their business solution is the key to a successful sales strategy. Searching for customers having the actual business problem and who can be converted into potential buyers is called creating an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
• Creating an ideal ICP means zeroing in on many of their attributes like demographics, company size, revenue, location, their requirements, the challenges they face, so on and so forth. The criteria could include a lot of other factors which as a business you have to set up.
• Targeting the incorrect prospects would only cause the company to incur unnecessary costs whereas focusing on the correct prospects can bring it more revenue as these could be the leads that are more likely to end up as buyers.
• Step 2 : Obtaining more information about your prospects by using appropriate data sources
• Once you know who your target audience is and how they should look, it becomes fairly easy to look for sources where the information of these prospects can be extracted from. After you’ve created your customer profile, you need relevant information like phone numbers, email addresses etc to initiate communication with. This data could be available either on the company's website, their social media pages or can be looked up on Google. But it is neither feasible nor advisable to scan each prospect and their associated information individually. Therefore, it becomes imperative to search for the right tools that can help extract detailed information of prospects.
• Step 3 : Finding the right automation tools to extract prospect data
• It is impossible to manually extract prospect information by visiting their websites or social media pages. And so, picking a correct tool like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator for fetching prospect data is a must in today’s times. A very useful tool built for finding relevant prospects, it provides plenty of features like advanced lead and company search, custom prospect lists, alerts and notifications on prospect activities. But not every company is active on LinkedIn which means that this tool cannot be of any use if LinkedIn is not the primary data source for any company/business.

Sales Jarvis for Sales and Prospecting Automation

• A sales acceleration platform, Sales Jarvis, is a Sales automation tool that automates your entire sales cycle by implementing prospecting automation, lead generation, email outreach, LinkedIn outreach, appointment generation, outbound marketing and much more.
• Sales Jarvis provides a hassle free, automated, ready to use picture of prospects and their details which speeds up the prospecting process.
• Based on the criteria and filters selected, Sales Jarvis helps you identify your target audience from 25+ sources like LinkedIn/angel/crunchbase etc.
• After identifying the correct audience, data for prospective clients is mined and the contact information of these clients is extracted from the system. Sales Jarvis also does email address validation of the prospects.
• Not only does Sales Jarvis help companies build their own workflows depending on their criteria while searching the target audience but also provides a library of already existing workflows which companies can use, some examples of which are targeting recently funded companies, targeting actively hiring companies, etc.
• Sales Jarvis doesn't stop here, it does a whole lot of things - Connect with us now to see SALES JARVIS in action and to ACCELERATE your SALES cycle.