Identifying as many prospects as possible is an important aspect of sales. You need to have a clear process in place for identifying, qualifying, and nurturing potential customers to increase the chances of closing deals and achieving sales targets.
Identifying as many potential prospects as possible is important for several reasons:
- It increases the chances of finding qualified leads: The more prospects a salesperson or team has, the more likely they are to find leads that match their target customer profile and that need their products or services.
- It helps to mitigate risk: Having a larger pool of prospects means less risk of relying on just a few leads to hit sales targets. This can help ensure that the sales pipeline is always full, which can help mitigate any unexpected delays or obstacles.
- It increases the chances of closing deals: The more prospects a salesperson or team has, the more opportunities they have to close deals. This can help to increase the chances of hitting sales targets and achieving overall business goals.
- It provides a broader range of opportunities: Identifying a larger pool of prospects can also provide a broader range of options for the sales team to expand and diversify their offerings to different customers.
- It enables sales teams to be more proactive: By having a larger pool of prospects, sales teams can be more proactive in reaching out to potential customers rather than waiting for them to come to them.
Turning Potential into Prospects
The objective is to target prospect roles by identifying the best stakeholders to receive your calls, voicemails, and emails. To accomplish this objective, you will need to do research.
This objective happens BEFORE you interact with a prospect (person in a role). It’s doing your homework before reaching out.
Who is the “Right” Prospect?
There are many ways to define the ‘right’ prospect. Some approaches help ‘get a meeting’; some ‘educate the prospect,’ and others’ drive to the one-call close.’ Those approaches work in some cases, such as when the sales team is solely focused on ‘getting the meeting’ or for organizations that sell commodity products and services that are low-cost/low-value, where there is only one product or service that the organization sells – but not for us.
Our company sells high-value, high-cost subscriptions based on consumption and services that help our customers solve strategic business problems. To sell the type of products and services, we have to start the sales process with every prospect before we know who the candidate is and what business need(s) they may have. Therefore, it would be best if you started qualifying the opportunity at the beginning of the prospecting process by being very selective with who you are targeting, what product and service you want to present to them, and why.
Managing the prospecting process
Start your prospecting journey by:
- Tailoring our point of view to the prospect
- Identifying what role(s), position(s), and title(s) the prospect has
- Understanding the size and scope of the organization (revenue, employee size, etc.)
- What trends are influencing the industry they are in
- What likely problems or challenges do they likely face
- What THEIR customers and prospects are likely expecting from them
- What is their likely approach to data infrastructure is
- Who are their top competitors are
When you gather this information, you will be empowered to target specific people in the organization with information and valuable insight to access them. When you do this research, it’s worth your time and investment to inform your assumptions or hypothesis on why stakeholders in the organization might be open to a dialogue with you.
To find the right prospects, you must make informed assumptions about what business problem they need to solve and what value they gain from using our product or service. For example, would they invest the time, resources, and money to work through their buying, purchasing, deployment, and ongoing adoption processes?