It’s doubtful you’re picturing an old fashioned gold prospector with long-johns and a shotgun.

It’s also doubtful that sales leaders and reps have a flawless grasp of sales prospecting in today’s market.

If you/your reps have 0 issues finding and accessing great leads, please stop reading. In fact, write us. We want you on our podcast.

Prospecting isn’t a wild west anymore. It’s more like an abandoned mining town. It can feel almost impossible to figure out a new way to connect. 

So let’s talk about sales prospecting today and what it’s going to take to find business opportunities.

The Definition of Sales Prospecting

Prospecting is about surveying the lay of the land and finding future customers. The task itself is often the first step in a sales cycle. 

How to Find Sales Opportunities

Finding sales opportunities starts with the who and moves quickly to the what and how:

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What do they need?
• How do you find them?

The actual tasks involved in sales prospecting aren’t particularly complex and include the following:

• List building by gathering, organizing, and prioritizing contact information

Then, tactically:

• Phone calls (cold calling or reaching leads where you have a relationship of some kind)
• Emailing
• Direct messaging

Very few sales reps are up to the earlobes in fresh leads. Many times, they will have to do this due diligence. And, news to no one, a lot of it these days happens online.

Where to Prospect for Sales

This, friends, is a big question. 

Even three years ago, we’d suggest a blend of in-person and digital networking. Maybe a 50-50 split. The industry event, trade show, local happy hour, conference, etc. 

Those were all great places to connect with people in a target field and start taking names. You’d feed these prospects into your CRM and follow up with phone calls, emails, Linkedin connection requests, and other elements of the courtship.

Since the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, sales reps everywhere have watched most of the in-person components of their prospecting strategies dissipate. This has presented a new challenge: how to find new contacts when you operate mostly online?

It’s one reason sales training focuses a lot on arming reps with innovative ways to make connections over a screen.

So let’s consider our shifted locations for “where to prospect for sales”:

Social Media 

B2B reps should be LinkedIn and Twitter fluent to start. B2C reps should be there as well as on TikTok, Instagram, and other more direct-to-consumer friendly platforms.

There are endless ways to meet prospects on social media, many of which mimic the in-person options: webinars, virtual networking events, online conferences, and creative ones like these:

• Engaging in industry-specific Facebook or LinkedIn groups
• Subscribing to the right YouTube channels and liking/commenting
• Hopping on Reddit and being smart and helpful
• Filming talking heads on Tiktok that showcase perspective and/or product
• Clapping at Medium posts

Reps who think outside the traditional platforms and uses of those platforms will pivot toward community building and thought leadership. It’s the right way to be visible and start expanding a network.

Lists, Lists, all the Lists

First, it’s almost never a good idea to buy lists. Bought lists face spam laws, irrelevance, deliverability issues (even threaten domain health), and just plain icy cold leads.

However, the data is out there. It’s everywhere. And there are subscription-based lists, buyable lists, and robust lists inside upgraded social media platforms (we’re thinking LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Meta Shops, etc.) that offer major insights to unlock meaningful access.

The power of new forms of data is that they almost always have accompanying demographic and even behavioral information that can help you (non-creepily) have a sweet first conversation. Think carefully about lists you may have access to and then consider the value of integrating them into your CRM, or going out and manually prospecting based on what you can find.

Official Databases via Automated Alerts

Want to sell into an industry that has a lot of start-ups? Those start-ups not only register LLCs and Trademarks, they also get funding. There are now more complex and timely databases than ever and they are available to the public. If you’re in the emerging field of cannabis, you can subscribe to Cannabiz (a giant database with real time insights into newly licensed dispensaries, etc.). If you’re in Life Sciences, there are both national and global databases you can join, gaining access to mega lists of primary and secondary players in the field.

What’s more, technology has made it possible to leverage the power of automation for early alerts.

Want to be notified anytime a company goes public and now has the buying power for your product? Want to know when a start-up launches in a niche that you sell into? There’s an API for that. It’s not cheating. It’s really really smart, tech-based prospecting that gives you a hyper-specific list of people to reach out to.

Those are three good options out of many.

The second half of the sales prospecting process then becomes: what do you do with this contact info? Pursue them online? DM three times? Have a non-intro’d call? Turns out, maybe to all three. But not without some training… and panache.

Face to face isn’t 100% dead, but it isn’t solely sufficient for most reps to perform at a high level.

Here’s a quick look at sales prospecting over the phone and over a computer, which will be the two ways reps are most likely to do it.

Sales Prospecting Over the Phone: Cold Calling

Good ole fashioned phone calls are still a primary way sales prospecting happens, and they can be very successful. But old school approaches — rigidly following a script — are really ineffective here.

We’ve crafted a very effective method we call the 10-3-3 framework for cold calling, and it goes like this:

• 10 seconds to keep them on the phone, which requires a reference and an “engage” question
• 30 seconds where you make two things clear: why you’re calling and why they should talk to you (we recommend finding the Other Centered™ Position – read the article below to learn what that is)
• 30 seconds where you get them to Drop the RopeⓇ, helping them understand there’s no you vs. them but that you want to be truly helpful

Depressurizing a cold call is key, and there’s a lot more detail on that process you can find by reading this: The 10-3-3 Framework for Cold Calling.

Sales Prospecting Over a Computer: Cold Messaging

Sales reps can make dozens of cold calls a day. Or they can send dozens, even tens of dozens, of emails and direct messages. The risk of ease here could actually undermine success. It’s almost a no-brainer to create a single message that can be copy pasted and put on blast. But that ignores the fundamental way human nature works, and plays right into the easy “mark as spam” or “trash” trigger finger most email readers have.

There must be just as much effort behind cold messaging as there is cold calling.

We recommend, first, remembering the individual on the other side of the screen is a real person. Not a random profile stock photo. Communicate personally.

Second, create a framework for sequencing direct messages or emails.

Ours is this:

Message 1 — Offer a disruptive truth. Something they can’t Google. Something they probably don’t know. 

The disruptive truth leads, not the solution, and that’s key. Reps enhance receptivity by sharing something that the customer may not know that will solve their problem. This disruptive truth always does one very specific, very important thing. It goes against conventional wisdom, and, because it’s not something they know, it gets their attention. It gets them to think about a whole new way of solving the problem

Message 2 — Offer expert insight. Something they haven’t thought of. Something that sets you apart.

Message 3 — Offer a proprietary benefit. Something you have that no one else has that ties into the first two messages.

Word of warning: even a spicy secret sauce like this isn’t foolproof. You must understand who you’re writing to… understand what they want and what their priorities are in a given moment. Your message has to feel timely and relevant. Only then will you have a chance of a real response.

Sales Prospecting for the Win

Sales prospecting can be a lot of things: intimidating, frustrating, challenging. But if you want to jumpstart great conversations, you’ve gotta start somewhere. 

Ready to dive deeper and really investigate the philosophies, history, and methodologies of sales prospecting?

Read The Complete Guide to Sales Prospecting, or connect with us anytime to learn more how to get trained or train your sales reps for sales prospecting success.