Performance Marketing Values Quality of Sales Process

Many businesses struggle to generate a consistent flow of highly qualified leads. Relying on stagnant marketing focused on quantity of marketing content causes frustration for sales reps, missed sales opportunities, and poorly organized sales pipeline. Conventional marketing includes Sales Prospecting Services within the Outbound Sales Process. If terms like cold calling, direct mail and blanket email blasts prompt visions of massive call centers and piles of junk mail, then your business is ready to graduate to performance marketing.

Valve+Meter helps great business leaders reimagine the role of Sales Prospecting Services in terms of quality. Within performance marketing, every speciality including the sales prospecting process exists as a unique asset. Our specialists first analyze the data within your business, then research the marketplace, and finally, uses proven strategies to reach the ideal prospect. In this data driven model, sales prospecting discards the outdated and ineffectual tactics of traditional marketing companies.

When leaders understand sales prospecting tools are an asset for relationship building, brand awareness and increased returns on marketing (ROMs) performance marketing is capable of accelerating the growth of your business.

Discover how Sales Prospecting Services with Valve+Meter can increase revenues and deliver better leads to your sales team.

How Does Performance Marketing Define Sales Prospecting?

Sales prospecting services, also known as outbound lead generation, is the process of identifying and engaging potential customers for your business. Within performance marketing, lead generation is one aspect of the data driven process. For emerging businesses and growing B2B businesses, sales prospecting adds additional nuance that involves researching and building a list of potential customers. Instead of broadcasting a wide message to general audiences hoping your brand connects, performance marketing identifies the market most likely to benefit from your products and services.

By crafting a distinct message finely tuned to resonate with the key decision makers within this select group, performance marketing builds your reputation, helps define your brand, and saves your sales team time and money. In short, if traditional sales prospecting is the ballyhoo of carnival barkers, then lead generation within Valve+Meter’s Performance Marketing model is the salient consultation of trusted experts.

Data Driven Tools

A key aspect of sales prospecting is relationship building and brand awareness. While lead generation focuses on identifying prospects and developing the most qualified leads, sales prospecting campaigns often take the shape of an introduction. Internal marketing teams and sales representatives are trained and skilled to close sales. Valve+Meter’s approach to sales prospecting helps put the most qualified prospects in front of your sales team.

Valve+Meter believes every business has potential growth stored within sales and operations. Conventional lead generation often acts against releasing the forward momentum of the sales process. Valve+Meter uses data driven tools as a fulcrum. We analyze your current contacts and existing customers to create an ideal buyer persona (IDP). Our tools search the marketplace for the richest sources of high quality prospects. We then follow specific outreach to introduce your product or service to these leads.

Specific Processes

When leads are properly vetted the sales pipeline is properly managed. Attracting new customers, creating awareness and generating enthusiasm often seems like pushing a boulder up a hill. Valve+Meter has a team of business development representatives who apply specific processes to phone, mail, email, and relationship management. Because all of our marketing is founded in data, metrics guide our actions so our strategies are constantly adapting and growing.

Why OTHERS STRUGGLE

Taking the time to reach out to a prospect directly and inform them about the product or service your company offers is a marketing challenge. If data does not drive your choices, even the best sales prospecting tools lead to repetitive tasks and failure. Many professional marketing campaigns cast a wide net to produce a lot of leads. A huge volume of poorly qualified leads creates a quagmire within your sales pipeline. 

Valve+Meter applies math before marketing so we attract better prospects, create valuable brand awareness and generate enthusiasm within the most fruitful marketplaces. Because we begin with quality prospects, we have time to provide nuanced techniques and patient representatives to advocate for the benefits of your company and identify the need for your products or services. The goal, of course, is to convert the prospect into a customer. When you hire Valve+Meter, we do the hardest work at the beginning. 

Instead of focusing on the volume of leads, we are driven by metrics that help you realize the full potential of your organization. No matter what your company size, reaching individual prospects, building a personalized message and performing effective follow ups are the most powerful sales prospecting tools. We create sales opportunities for your business and hand them off to your sales team to close more deals.

What Are Different Types of Sales Prospecting Strategies?

There’s no shortage of tech tools to source the correct data: industry codes, technographic, titles, and a myriad of other criteria. Beyond all the pomp and circumstance, the best sales prospecting tools are talented and smart people. Through experience and skills, people apply intuition to sales prospecting tools to test and modify lists and achieve your sales meeting goals.

Sales prospecting is time intensive and thus sales prospecting tools form a strategy to accomplish the most work possible. Outbound prospecting may begin with a prospect list established within your business. Sales teams and marketing teams are often tasked with list building in a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Many of these prospect lists are ignored but provide an ideal point to begin effective sale prospecting tactics.

There are 7 key sales prospecting tactics marketing professionals perform to find new prospects in your target market.

PHONE CALLS

Sales calls help to identify prospects and define ideal customers. Sales prospecting phone calls are a type of outreach used to reach out to businesses most likely to benefit from your products or services. During a sales prospecting phone call, the representative typically introduces your company, and then explains the products or services they offer. They may also ask targeted questions about the potential customer’s needs and interests. In order to find qualified leads, sales prospecting services use phone calls to measure the fit between your offers and the needs of the potential lead.

There are two goals of a sales prospecting phone call: establish a connection with the potential customer and build data to formulate the ideal prospect or ideal buyer persona. This second goal is important to designing an effective and efficient sales strategy. Phone calls may involve setting up a follow up call or meeting, or simply collecting the potential customer’s contact details and company details for future prospecting.

These calls are designed to be professional and informative, and focus on building a relationship with the potential customer.

AUTOMATED VOICEMAIL

Messages can be used to introduce a prospect to your products or services. Automated voicemail is a method to reach out to a broad swath of potential customers in a minimal amount of time. The highly crafted personalized message persuades interested parties to visit your company’s website or get in contact with sales reps.

This customer acquisition tactic is effective not only at reaching more leads quickly but the data guides marketing strategy. By persuading new leads to visit your company’s webpage you are able to better understand the key demographics of respondents.

DIRECT MAIL

Similar to automated voicemail, direct mail is an effective device in reaching broad audiences quickly. Whether it be a letter, postcard or flier, direct mail introduces your products and services. Highly skilled design and copywriting entice prospects to take an action and possibly consider purchasing a service or product from your company.

Direct mail can be targeted to specific groups of potential customers, including particular industry and geographic areas, most likely to have interest in your products or services.

Beyond cultivating leads, modern direct mail helps with data input. For young businesses and emerging products, defining the ideal customer profile can be difficult. Direct mail uses phone numbers, website landing pages and other tools to learn more about the respondents. Sales prospecting tools use this information to finely tune the outbound sales process.

Email

Like phone numbers, many businesses have email lists. Poorly maintained and improperly managed CRM leaves most sales reps scratching their heads when it comes to email outreach. When properly utilized, email is a highly powerful sales prospecting tool.

Cold Emailing

The first stage especially when email lists have not been segmented and properly managed is cold email outreach. This involves sending email to potential customers with an introduction to your company, announcement of your products or services, and a call to action to visit a landing page.

Email campaigns

Respondents to cold emails are segmented into an email campaign. Sales prospecting services build email campaigns around the unique sales pipeline of each business. For businesses with long sales cycles email campaigns can involve multiple and even dozens of messages. Email campaigns include personalized and targeted messages to sales prospects. Over a period of time the series of emails helps guide prospects from the top of the funnel and attraction stage through the middle of the funnel and finally transfer highly qualified leads to your sales teams to close.

Great email campaigns largely rely on the engagement stage and middle of the funnel. This can often be difficult for businesses and organizations to strategize. While bottom of the funnel interests and needs are easier to identify, middle of the funnel prospects often include distinct demographics and interest groups. Just like traditional advertising and paid online ads, the marketing campaign to a 5 year old is distinct from a marketing campaign targeting that child’s grandfather. While the thesis of each email in the series may be the same, design and messaging of emails should be adjusted for a number of key demographics. Sales prospecting services help businesses segment and control brand messaging to the key target markets within your email campaigns.

Follow up email

For many businesses, the sales cycle is short. After a prospect responds to a cold email, contact form on your company website or other call to action, sales prospecting campaigns use follow up emails to provide additional information, answer questions, and encourage the prospect to take the next steps toward purchase. Each action helps navigate prospects from attraction through brand engagement and into the sales process. Follow up email also helps reach the key decision makers in businesses. In B2B sales one of the greatest obstacles is gaining clear access to the decision makers within each company you are targeting.

NETWORKING

Industry events, trade shows and social networks are key to sales prospecting. Your greatest advocates are friends, colleagues, other business leaders and existing clients. Networking is a great avenue to find potential customers but many businesses do not have a process in place to nurture these relationships.

Sales Prospecting Services help you manage existing relationships for your business leaders and sales team. Personalized email messages, email newsletters and even appointment setting help your sales team practice the best tactics.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Few companies saw the rise of social media platforms as viable B2B sales prospecting tools. Most business leaders and even marketing experts can saliently predict the trends, rise and fall of social media platforms. Sales Prospecting Services finds the experts for you. Instead of scrambling to find and train social media experts within your own business, Sales Prospecting Services manages advertising across all platforms and showcasing your products and services on organic social media accounts. Building relationships with platforms and social media influencers helps drive new prospects to your company website and the specific landing pages you need to understand your audience.

Effective Sales Prospecting Techniques

Highly skilled sales prospecting services use nuanced and sophisticated steps to generate data about ideal buyers. The 7 sales prospecting tactics gather potential prospects and just as importantly glean data about your target audience. Minimizing wasted marketing expenses is key to effective sales prospecting techniques.

Many businesses with limited resources begin sales prospecting on their own. Sales teams can quickly find pain points instead of more deals. Consider the 3 steps most often used to improve prospecting.

CREATE AN IDEAL PROSPECT PROFILE

Before you pick up the phone or fire off an email, spend some time finding out exactly who your ideal customer is. Once you develop your own list of best potential buyers, use it with the existing company list to find and contact companies that might be eager to do business with you.

What does the resulting data show? If you cannot clearly define the ideal customer for your products or services you likely are working with bad data. If you do not know your target market you can create high quality brand messaging.

With bad data, you can quickly burn through leads with indiscriminate messages. Your company is likely to waste resources of talented sales reps pitching the wrong leads.

WORK ON CALL LISTS

A call or prospect list isn’t just a list of a bunch of names and phone numbers to call. A properly maintained call list contains several qualifying questions to ask the prospect in order to create a healthy dialogue with them. This will help you discover their pain points and how your company can assist them, making your sales prospecting attempts much easier.

Sales prospecting tools include distinguishing cold leads, warm leads and hot leads. As noted before, brand messages are unique for each demographic. A prospect list should be curated carefully so your unique prospecting process can be designed.

SEND PERSONALIZED EMAILS

If your internal sales and marketing teams can clear the hurdles of defining the buyer persona and generating leads from existing call lists, then you will need to qualify prospects arriving on your company website and responding to contact forms.

Individual contact details are highly valuable so smart businesses must be careful with their prospects. It’s easy for potential buyers to tell if your company just fired off the email they just received to hundreds of other people, too.

To help guide buyers through the sales funnel, you will need to craft personalized emails to prospects by including their name several times, a compliment, and discuss mutual connections the two of you share. Before you share leads with the sales teams you need to make sure they are at the bottom of the funnel and ready to close.

QUALITY OVER QUANTITY

A few high-quality leads are much more beneficial than several leads that don’t go anywhere. The business development representatives at Valve+Meter ensure the leads we hand over to your sales team are worth your time and have a high potential of converting. We spend the time to determine who is a good fit with your company’s profile.

If your sales people are doing internal sales prospecting make sure the key decision makers are receiving the message. Without specialized training your personnel can waste hours talking to unqualified leads. The wasted expense often leads to frustration, loss of ambition and even personnel changes.

ASK FOR REFERRALS

Let’s assume you have cleared the hurdles and you’ve successfully converted a lead into a sale, don’t stop there!

Ask the prospect or lead if there’s anyone in their network that might be worth connecting with. If a customer has already been onboarded, they’re probably happy with your service and will be more likely to provide you with contact information from others within their professional network.

This requires special attention from your sales rep closest to the deal. Personalized messages and consistent relationship building is vital to gaining referrals. Your brand always needs to be top of mind with your existing clients.

SALES PROSPECTING IS AN ONGOING EVENT

Be consistent and set aside time each day for sales prospecting. At the end of the day, it’s about keeping in touch with sales prospects. Every sales cycle is unique but your current customers are your most loyal and loudest advocates. Contact them again every several weeks with personal messages. Celebrate milestones in their lives including birthdays, anniversaries, holidays and family events. Before long, you may turn that cold lead into a hot one!

Of course all of this is ambitious. Busy professionals do not have time to pause and reach out to every existing client. Your team doesn’t have the capacity to record and automate life events of clients. Businesses focus on growing internally and developing new offerings and finding new prospects.

Hiring Sales Prospecting Services

Sales prospecting is the process of identifying and researching potential customers in order to generate leads and ultimately make sales. It is an ongoing event because it is a continuous process that is essential for the success of any sales team.

Many internal strategies fail because time and priorities are easily corrupted. Internal marketing is usually split between sales reps and generalists. Sales prospecting is a long term strategy so when pain points arise in busy sales cycles prospecting stalls or worse yet stops altogether.

The goal of sales prospecting is to build a pipeline of potential customers, or “prospects,” that a salesperson can then follow up with and potentially convert into paying customers. Because the sales cycle is ongoing, salespeople need to continually identify new prospects and work to nurture those relationships in order to maintain a healthy pipeline.

Sales prospecting is a crucial part of the sales process and requires persistence, research, and strong communication skills. By continuously identifying and engaging with new prospects, salespeople can ensure that they have a steady stream of leads to follow up on and convert into customers.

Sales prospecting services is a key tool that automates your pain points to provide greater performance and save your company lost revenue.

WHAT IS AT RISK WHEN PROSPECTING STOPS

Internal efforts almost always fail and even successful prospecting is far from optimal. Stopping sales prospecting within your business can be risky for a number of reasons. Most notably, internal teams are likely to stop prospecting when representatives are at capacity. Why would a sales rep send an email to an existing customer when there are plenty of leads calling in everyday?

This is a natural reaction to great prospecting. When the sales funnel is working efficiently, leads arrive each day and new prospects are served through outreach. Most sales funnels work in fits and starts. Internal prospecting or a big outside marketing campaign delivers leads. When those efforts stop, the leads dry up.

Every time prospecting stops, leads will decrease. Expensive marketing advertising can cover this problem but without prospecting you sacrifice future revenue. The cycle can lead to decreases in sales and revenue. If a sales team is not actively prospecting for new leads, they will have fewer opportunities to make sales and generate revenue for the company. This can have serious consequences for the overall financial health of the organization.

Because the best sales prospecting tools include follow up, networking and relationship building, the new sales in the present can quickly fall into disorganized sales leads. As noted earlier, Valve+Meter often starts the sales prospecting process by auditing client’s existing data.

The goal of sales prospecting is growth of the company. In addition to the financial risks, when you stop prospecting you can quickly suffer a lack of growth and stagnation. Without a constant influx of new leads, a sales team may struggle to expand their customer base and may struggle to keep up with competitors who are actively prospecting.

Sales prospecting process can also lead to a loss of expertise and skills. Salespeople who are not constantly prospecting may lose their ability to effectively research and engage with potential customers, which can ultimately make it harder for them to succeed in the future. If your sales numbers look like a roller coaster with feasts and famines, you may benefit from outside help.

Overall, it is most practical to separate prospecting from sales teams. This makes the sales funnel constant because sales prospecting tools are continuously engaging prospects and existing clients in the prospecting process. This maintains a healthy pipeline of qualified leads for sales reps. The steady process generates more revenue and better serves the long term growth of your business. Leads and clients received the same consistent messages about your brand’s products or services. Within the market you gain a competitive advantage over other companies who stay locked into outdated sales prospecting practices.

WHY INTERNAL TEAMS STRUGGLE TO IMPLEMENT PROSPECTING PROCESS?

Sales prospecting requires a significant amount of time, effort, and research, and some companies may not have the necessary resources or dedicated staff to effectively pursue potential customers. So a lack of resources is a major factor.

Another reason is lack of clear strategy or planning. Lack of data creates major pain points in outbound sales. Without a clear understanding of who your target audience is and how to best reach them, a company may struggle to effectively identify and engage with potential customers. Without a clear understanding of what success looks like and how to measure it, you are often left struggling to track and measure effort.

Finally, the company size plays a major role. Even for large companies taking advantage of outside prospecting is a financially prudent choice. Without complete buy-in individuals and inexperienced personnel will flounder trying to perform outreach.

Prospecting directly typically bears highly qualified prospects but it is far less glamorous than other marketing efforts. Traditional advertising like television and print serve the vanity of leadership. Resources like new websites and the immediacy of online advertising like Pay-Per-Click (PPC) may drive marketing choices away from prospecting.

THE BENEFITS OF OUTSOURCING PROSPECTING SERVICES

There are many administrative tasks in B2B prospecting that help find new business but benefit greatly from outside prospecting. The key benefits include:

Expertise and specialization

Sales prospecting requires a specific set of skills and knowledge, and outsourcing to a specialized agency brings a level of expertise that may not be available in-house.

Time and efficiency

Sales prospecting is time-consuming and requires a significant investment of resources. Outsourcing allows a company to focus on their core competencies while still benefiting from the efforts of an experienced sales prospecting team.

Cost-effectiveness

Outsourcing sales prospecting can often be more cost-effective than hiring and training a team in-house. This is especially true for small or mid-sized companies that may not have the budget to support a dedicated sales prospecting team.

Flexibility and scalability

There is a tremendous benefit for seasonal businesses. Outsourcing allows a company to scale up or down their sales prospecting efforts around peak seasons. This means you only spend money on the services when you need them. When market conditions change you can react quickly.

Organizing data and client information

Outsourcing is extremely useful because the best sales prospecting tools help you organize and plan outreach. When you eliminate bad data with the right sales prospecting tool, sales reps are no longer the gatekeeper to client information. The company becomes the primary brand ambassador and messaging can be optimized based on data rather than assumption and intuition.

Your Value Proposition Delivered On Time

A value proposition is a statement that clearly communicates the benefits and value that your company’s product or service offers to potential customers. In the context of sales prospecting, a value proposition is an important tool for attracting and engaging potential customers.

A strong value proposition helps to differentiate your company from competitors. Sales prospecting services carry that message including the unique benefits and value that your company’s offering provides every time.

Automation carries your brand identity clearly and on time through the sales cycle. From cold emails or calls to introduce your company through every marketing material, sales prospecting tools driven by data help attract visitors and generate leads.

Prospecting tools help to track and measure the effectiveness of the value proposition. While a sales rep can wave the banner and close sales, data provides additional capabilities and new potentials to better attract new customers, engage qualified leads and delight customers with your unique offerings.

Let Valve+Meter do the Heavy Lifting for Your Company

As a comprehensive marketing agency, Valve+Meter helps companies grow wisely. We use data to measure performance, test new hypotheses and stop wasting money marketing dollars on ineffective advertising. Like the rest of our services, Valve+Meter’s sales prospecting tool finds the stored potential within your business and constantly tests performance. This helps you maximize return on investment (ROI) and demonstrates how to scale your business to exponential growth.

Marketing campaigns and the sales prospecting process alike are tough to manage on your own. Valve+Meter is a lead-generation agency built to focus on prospects and outcomes that grow your sales pipeline. We work with B2B companies on creating qualified lead generation and sales prospecting campaigns to drive growth. If you’re ready for a new type of lead-generation partner that will help with all aspects of sales prospecting, request a free marketing analysis today.