To increase your sales, it is certainly important to develop a useful offer to consumers, but you must also think about an effective prospecting strategy. Do you want to know the techniques to follow to prospect better? We explain it all in this article.

Differentiate between the two main methods of prospecting

To win new customers, you can choose between two main prospecting methods:

• outbound marketing, which consists of contacting prospects directly to offer them your product/service;
• inbound marketing, which consists of encouraging prospects to contact your company directly to ask questions about your product/service.

Each of these strategies has its own advantages and limitations, so it’s up to you to decide which one is best for your business. However, you don’t have to make a choice: you can combine these two strategies to create a mixed prospecting technique. On the one hand, for example, you can rely on an indirect approach to attract consumers (sponsored links), and on the other hand, you contact interested prospects directly by sending them personalized messages.

Choosing the right outbound prospecting lever

If you have decided to bet on outbound marketing, there are four prospecting channels available to you:

• prospecting by telephone or “phoning”;
• prospecting by e-mail or “e-mailing”;
• Prospecting by mail;
• prospecting on social networks.

It is important to know the uses of your target audience before choosing one of these levers. The realization of a small market study is often necessary to optimize your choice, to discover the real market trends and to find the most frequented communication channels.

Mastering inbound prospecting techniques

If you have selected inbound marketing, you have access to a wide range of techniques and digital tools that allow you to attract qualified leads. For example, you can optimize your web content, your affiliate strategies or your search engine optimization. You can also work on the aesthetics of your website and its mobile adaptability. Inbound strategies, it is essential to integrate relevant calls to action in the right places, at the right times and with the best forms. This step is particularly important if you want to convince your prospect to buy your products/services, download your sheets/guides or subscribe to your newsletters. Inbound strategies are more difficult to implement than outbound practices and often require the expertise of professionals. Don’t hesitate to ask for advice from digital marketing experts to identify the best strategy for your company.

Enrich your CRM with a lead generation tool

To capture the attention of your prospects, you must first be interested in them. You need to discover their profile, their industry, their age, their needs and expectations in order to adapt your commercial approach and sales pitch. You must collect information about them and centralize it in a unique database called CRM. Successful sales prospecting necessarily involves enriching this CRM.

Dedicated lead generation tools have been designed to help you do this. Kaspr, for example, allows you to retrieve your prospects’ contact information through a simple process. To find out their emails and phone numbers, all you have to do is view their LinkedIn profile and display their contact information on a Google Chrome extension. The collected data can then be exported directly to your CRM. It’s important to note that Kaspr operates in a completely legal manner. Contact information is disclosed in compliance with French law.

Approach prospects in a subtle way

The message to prospects must be as personalized as possible in order to expect positive feedback. The language, the vocabulary, the colors and the channels used count a lot in the success of a commercial prospecting. Indeed, it is not enough to have a quality product/service that meets the needs of consumers to make better sales. It is also essential to know how to communicate its assets, its characteristics and what it could bring to potential customers. Whether you intend to approach your prospects through phoning, e-mailing or your website, you must master the proper approach techniques. Avoid being too intrusive and persistent in your approaches, at the risk of annoying your prospects and losing their interest. Short but precise messages are generally more appreciated and work best. Give them priority in your commercial prospecting.

The essentials to remember

To optimize your sales prospecting, you must first identify your ideal marketing approach. What would work best for your company: inbound or outbound strategy? It’s up to you to answer and analyze this question. Then, you need to choose the best channels and techniques that would allow you to attract the maximum number of customers. Before writing your sales pitch, you’ll need to enrich your contact database with a lead generation tool like Kaspr, which gives you the opportunity to make it easier to contact your prospects by offering to discover their email addresses and phone numbers. You can also automate the sending of LinkedIn invitations.