How can you train your enterprise sales reps to more effectively prospect for new clients?
Prospecting is tough. Targets receive countless new sales messages every week. Among the noise of our digitized world, it’s becoming more and more difficult for sales reps to earn even a moment of attention.
No matter how tough it is, success is non-negotiable. Without good enterprise sales prospecting, your sales pipeline slows, which has catastrophic ripple effects.
How can you, as a leader, help your team become better at enterprise sales prospecting?
Here are some actionable tips.
For a deeper dive into sales prospecting strategies, check out ASLAN’s Complete Guide to Sales Prospecting.
Tips for Corporate and B2B Sales Prospecting
It should be obvious: the old approach to corporate and B2B sales prospecting is out.
Embracing new technology is a good place to start, but effective sales prospecting isn’t just swapping tired old for shiny new.
Equipping your team to successfully prospect requires a paradigm shift.
What if you could reframe prospecting? What if cold calls weren’t dreaded? What if reps felt confident? What if they succeeded more? All of this is possible, as are the measurable results that come when reps change their thinking and commit to prospecting the right way.
Here are nine ideas to re-enliven B2B sales prospecting.
1. Create the Ideal Prospect Profile
Knowing exactly who reps are targeting is priority one.
To create an ideal prospect profile, consider:
- Psychographics: psychographics = motivations, values, and goals. Ask your reps what they think is on their prospects’ whiteboards, or what their customers’ biggest priorities are. This is starting on an Other-Centered™ foot, which means prospects will feel an immediate familiarity. Then, messaging can be tailored to speak directly to these issues.
- Demographics: what does your ideal client look like? This picture is easier to paint (and in way more detail) than in our rolodex days. Technology can help reps harvest tons of basic facts to fill in the profile: career stage, location, title(s), etc. All the facts.
- Behaviors: this is perhaps the least objective and most important one. Really high-performing salespeople tend to have a knack for understanding people instinctively. The idea is to figure out behavior patterns: based on the first two categories, what can we reasonably expect someone to do? How do they act? What kind of language do they respond to? Where do they look for news and information? Dive in. Flesh it out.
Hot tip: really good reps do a great job of “matching and mirroring.” Once they observe and understand a prospect’s behavior, they can match and mirror vocabulary, conversational cadence/rhythm, posture and gestures, and more.
All of this can be used to create a really well-built persona that helps reps have targeted, meaningful entry points.
2. Identify Vetting Criteria for Opportunities
A key component of effective prospecting is knowing when to go all in and when to let things fizzle out.
Not every prospect is going to be a customer. Not every convo is worth having.
Vetting criteria is a tried-and-true practice that helps reps clarify whether they should spend time and resources.
Constantly tweak and refine these criteria over time as you learn more about the prospects that progress through your sales funnel.
Identify the shared qualities of closed versus lost clients. Pay attention to the people who may have initially not given the time of day or slipped through the cracks. Revisit the conversation.
The more precise these criteria become, the more strategic reps can be at where they spend their time.
3. Expand the Network
Regardless of how many sales prospecting tools are available today, there’s simply no substitute for a solid warm intro.
People trust people they know. If your reps can leverage referrals from their networks, they’ll be in a much better position to break down the barriers that hold them back.
The bigger a network is, the more opportunities reps have.
Every rep should be taught how to expand a network for corporate prospecting. Depending on your field and goals, this may include attending industry events, forming new partnerships, meeting more colleagues, engaging in the community, and expanding reach on social media (especially LinkedIn).
Speaking of which…
4. Excel at Social Media
When it comes to growing a network, social media is an invaluable tool.
A strong social media presence leads to more social selling opportunities.
Social selling is a core tactic for many B2B sales organizations.
Platforms like LinkedIn offer an unmatched opportunity for reps to identify new prospects and start to build early-stage relationships. Get them actively using tools like LinkedIn Premium and Sales Navigator to source, vet, reach, connect with, then direct message viable prospects.
5. Be More Relevant
Being all volume and no substance is a quick way to deteriorate your business’s reputation. In other words: just blasting prospecting messages at scale (because you can) is a bad idea.
Instead, your reps should learn how to use all of the great prospecting profiling and tech-based tools to get more and more specific and targeted in what they say.
Prospecting can be (and should be) highly relevant. Every subject line, every header, every greeting, should make sense to the prospect and feel like it’s directed at them.
Reps can make all references much more relevant when they’re working from accurate demographics and psychographics, but the best ones go even deeper. What does this prospect care about? What are their priorities? What’s going on in their industry? What’s in the news? What’s concerning them? How does your solution perfectly meet them in that time of need?
This is the commentary they’ll notice. It’s the outreach they’ll care about.
6. Go Old School
These days, cold emails and LinkedIn messages are table stakes.
Great B2B prospecting happens when you stand out from the crowd. That means you have to think outside of the box. What can you do differently from your competition?
Get creative. And don’t be afraid of low-tech.
We’ve said it a couple of times, but let’s be real clear here: technology is great for all of the research stages and for gaining access to people in a digital world. But the best corporate prospectors are your people who get people: who are so good at making a connection on a thread and warming up a prospect with a friendly, non-obnoxious convo.
Reps may send a prospect an interesting book or a handwritten note. Invite them out to lunch at a nice restaurant near. Take them to the golf course. Do the human things.
7. Commit to the Long Play
Reps need patience. Because of how easy information is to get, and messages are to send, it can make them rush. But faux urgency is in poor taste. It’s way too easy for a prospect to just tune out if they’re being pressured too early.
Success lies in being persistent while also being other-conscious and kind. Reps that invest the right amount of time in building relationships — especially in B2B prospecting — will have a better win rate. Sure, every so often they’ll reel in a whale overnight, but that’s luck.
For tried and true success, reps should be consistently showing up and adding value.
Your team might be prospecting new clients for deals worth millions or even billions of dollars. Reeling in a whale is going to take a little bit of time.
8. Spread Your Efforts
Don’t pin all your prospecting hopes on one or two prospects. Without inside access, there is always a margin or error about who will actually make a final decision. The number of people a rep may need to win before the WIN can be hard to pin down.
Reps should learn how to connect with decision-makers at various levels of the organization. This of course means doing some of the hyper-personalized communication outreach multiple times, communicating in the right way at different levels.
With a wider effort, reps will better uncover which levers they need to pull to get into the room where decisions are made.
9. Become an Expert
With the level of depth and specialization in large enterprises, it’s crucial that sales reps have real expertise in the topics they’re talking to prospects about.
Get them training on this. Without it, their conversations will lack substance or even context, which is a quick way to get tuned out.
At ASLAN, our Other-Centered framework works amazingly for cold outreach. It includes three types of early convos that help sales reps warm up a lead:
- Offer a Disruptive Truth
- Share an Expert Insight
- Highlight a Proprietary Benefit
That expert insight is made possible when reps are students of the industry, staying abreast of what matters and what’s happening.
This is one reason all ASLAN sales training programs are customized to the unique needs of your sales organization. To learn more about our programs, contact us today.
Expert Corporate Sales Prospecting Starts With Equipped Reps
Great corporate sales prospecting is hard, and becoming great at it requires you, and your team, to put in the deep work and hard hours that will help you stand apart from your competitors.
Our sales training programs encourage sales reps and sales leaders to embrace an entirely new philosophy toward prospecting: one that puts the prospect at the heart of all conversations and considerations.
Interested in learning more? Download a Program Overview for Access now.
