TL;DR
– Systematically convert your targets into leads, then into qualified, loyal prospects.
– Distinguish between inbound marketing (attraction) and outbound marketing (targeted proactive outreach).
– Guide prospects throughout the sales cycle to maximize conversions.
– Build quality business partnerships essential for your company’s prosperity.
– Utilize high-performance tools based on years of experience and concrete case studies.
Your company can only thrive by relying on quality business partners and quality customers.
B2B web prospecting is an essential activity for your business. Sooner or later, you will be forced to go through it. And the sooner you tackle the subject, the better.
We have been supporting our clients for years with their B2B prospecting challenges. Our tool is today one of the most effective on the market thanks to our experience and our hundreds of hours spent on case studies.
What is B2B prospecting and what is its purpose? How to successfully implement a commercial prospecting strategy?
Discover without further delay five tips to improve your process.
What is B2B Prospecting?
As its name suggests, B2B (business to business) prospecting includes all actions aimed at acquiring new prospects and professional partners.
Logically, it is carried out with companies, unlike B2C prospecting which targets the general public.
Beyond simply generating leads and collecting information about them, it also involves guiding them throughout your sales cycle to ultimately succeed in retaining them.
Inbound or Outbound Marketing?
When you embark on commercial prospecting, you must keep in mind the goal of transforming your targets into leads, your leads into prospects, and then your prospects into customers.
While they are harder to convert in B2B than in B2C, they are also more sustainable.
Unlike the volatility of general consumers, professional relationships are more likely to last.
Hence the importance of prospecting and qualifying your leads carefully from the start.
To achieve this, two methods appeal to marketing and sales experts: outbound and inbound.
- Inbound Marketing: This is the technique mostly favored nowadays. Everything relies on a company’s ability to offer the right content at the right time to the right person. By bombarding a prospect with resources likely to address their current issues, you will gradually gain their trust and have a better chance of moving them easily through your sales cycle. 93% of companies using inbound marketing have seen real impacts on their conversion rates.
- Outbound Marketing: This is the oldest method. Increasingly less effective, it consists of approaching a prospect to sell services, without having established any contextual groundwork. It is considered more intrusive. On the other hand, it has the merit of being quicker to implement and reaching a larger volume of professional contacts.
For outbound marketing – in line with sales outreach – you can use LaGrowthMachine: our tool allows you to automate all your prospecting actions!
You can import a lead file, from which we will enrich the data. Then, you can easily schedule sequences to send messages to your leads across different channels until you get a response from them.
Get 3.5X More Leads!
Looking to improve your sales team’s performance? LaGrowthMachine allows you to generate an average of 3.5X more leads while saving you a ton of time on all your processes. By signing up today, you get a 14-day free trial to test our tool!
Why do B2B Prospecting?
Without new leads, it’s difficult to ensure the longevity of your company. It is the foundation of your development plan.
Overall, commercial prospecting on the Internet allows you to:
- Generate Business: This is the obvious point. Prospecting allows you to convert new leads into customers, ensuring the growth of your revenue.
- Diversify Your Prospects: You cannot work with the same clients your entire life. By seeking new market shares, you diversify your revenue streams and no longer have to rely on a single client representing all your profits.
- Retain Your Prospects: By implementing an effective inbound marketing strategy, you have every chance of becoming indispensable to your current clients. The more resources, events, or even dedicated promotions you offer them, the more likely they are to return for their next campaign.
- Improve Your Company’s Brand Awareness: The more you approach potential service providers, clients, and companies, the more you expand your database and professional network. By forging new contacts and presenting your services, you will significantly improve brand recall. Provided you are not perceived as a spammer (hence the importance of refining your approaches).
How to Lay the Foundation for Your Commercial Prospecting?
Before delving into the details of different prospecting channels and methods, let’s briefly summarize the questions you need to ask yourself.
If you launch your strategy without having established a prospecting plan, you can be sure you will waste time and money.
Pay attention to:
- Clearly defining your objectives and personas
- Setting quantifiable and achievable results
- Properly segmenting your contact lists
- Conscientiously analyzing your results
To learn more about the methodology for successfully implementing your commercial prospecting strategy in 2022, click here.
7 Methods to Succeed in Your B2B Prospecting
As time goes on, commercial prospecting methods become more diversified. Nowadays, digital prospecting has supplanted more traditional methods.
No more relying solely on television, radio, or 4×3 billboards in the subway. Today, leads are prospected online, on LinkedIn, on Google, via email…
VSEs/SMEs can embark on this adventure thanks to strategies based on approaches requiring very small budgets, or even completely free.
There are increasingly more tools adapted to all budgets and all company sizes.
Let’s look at the most common methods together. You can then determine which one seems most suitable for prospecting and developing your business.
Email Prospecting
We start with a classic. Prospecting by email is nothing new, but it’s a method that continues to prove its worth.
While the method has changed, the ingredients remain the same. It is crucial to place great importance on your copywriting.
Be ingenious in writing your hooks. Use the information gathered about them to personalize your content. Capture your targets’ attention in seconds. You won’t have more time to win them over anyway.
On average, only 20% of emails sent in B2B are opened by your recipients.
LaGrowthMachine also offers sequences solely on the email channel:
In many cases, this will be enough! But if you really want to boost your prospecting to the next level, go multi-channel!
For your information, here are the results of one of our campaigns on cold prospecting:
One out of two leads responded to one of our messages, a conversion rate of over 50%… and all this automated.
Telephone Prospecting
Telephone prospecting is still widely used by large groups looking to achieve volume rather than quality.
We are not saying it’s a bad idea. We are just saying that if you mismanage your telephone prospecting, you risk seriously compromising your brand image.
Like most current marketing techniques, it is important to think about your interlocutor first before thinking about yourself.
Be interested in their needs, listen to your lead speak before trying to sell your services at all costs. Here are a few tips for managing your phone calls effectively:
- Work on your sales pitch beforehand
- Prepare a sales script
- Craft your introduction: the first 10 seconds determine the success of your call
- Ask questions to identify your interlocutor’s needs
- Anticipate their objections
- Only use your sales pitch at the right time (when you have learned enough)
- Pace your speech, make the call lively
- Use the QQOQCP method
- Disrupt voicemails by being innovative
If you manage to put all these tips into practice, you should see your conversion rate soar.
Event Prospecting and Networking
The last old-school method on our list, but still very effective. This is natural, as nothing beats human contact for closing deals.
Proximity allows you to build trust and gauge your interlocutor’s reactions in real-time.
Do you see them hesitate? You can adjust your speech. Do you sense confidence? Continue in that direction.
Unfortunately, participating in networking events or B2B trade shows requires time, sometimes without concrete results.
It is a time-consuming task that nevertheless deserves to be considered, as it requires no marketing budget (unless you set up a stand at a prominent trade show to boost your visibility, but that’s another matter).
Multi-channel Prospecting
Why settle for a single entry point when you can improve your response rate by opting for multi-channel prospecting.
In theory, your commercial lead is present on many platforms.
- They use Twitter for marketing and to monitor their industry.
- They have a professional email address and phone number.
- They scroll through LinkedIn to build relationships or observe the competition.
You can leverage all these entry points to your advantage. When designing your prospecting plan, think about multiplying the entry points to make contact and build adapted sequences.
After assisting over 4000 clients with their campaigns, LaGrowthMachine has observed that multi-channel prospecting multiplies the response rate by 3.5.
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation defines all processes that allow for the automation of your prospecting processes by eliminating time-consuming tasks.
It thus allows marketers and salespeople to focus on high-value-added tasks, including content optimization, leveraging collected information, or improving conversion rates.
The automation of your tasks is particularly important when implementing a multi-channel strategy.
Thanks to adapted tools, you automatically define the actions that will define the scalability of your workflows. In parallel, you manually improve the quality of your messages, the segmentation of your contact lists, the quality of traffic to your website…
Concretely, you can eliminate up to 40% of your work time this way and reallocate it to other aspects of the job that are more impactful for your business.
Choosing the Right Digital Prospecting Tool
No marketing automation without an outreach tool.
Take your business to the next level with marketing automation and use the information collected by your digital prospecting tools to analyze and iterate.
Today, the best platforms (including LaGrowthMachine, of course) provide access to detailed reports, which you can export to Excel or PDF files.
These advanced statistics (open rates, response rates, conversion rates…) allow you to optimize your scenarios and consequently, boost your revenue.
To simplify your task, we have listed the 20 best sales automation tools in this article.
Conclusion:
Congratulations, you have just unlocked the “Commercial Prospecting Expert” badge.
However, theory is not enough. Practice is inherent to the success of your strategy.
Whatever method you choose, the most important thing is to lay the groundwork for your commercial prospecting by establishing a precise plan, and then analyzing the results obtained.
Only when you achieve satisfactory results with one technique or another can you begin to replicate your scenarios. Consequently, the scalability of your business is assured.
Social Selling and LinkedIn Prospecting
Beware of those who tell you that social selling is the future. Because the future is now.
Social selling encompasses all free or paid techniques used on social networks to build relationships and engage with new prospects. LinkedIn has even created the Social Selling Index, an index to measure the strength of one’s profile in social selling.
While the use of social media was considered a gimmick by many companies, the reality on the ground is quite different.
In B2B, LinkedIn has become one of the major channels.
💡 Striking Figures
Source: Hubspot
LinkedIn, and by extension all social networks (like Twitter or Instagram), offer an unprecedented playground on the internet for prospecting and data collection.
In just a few clicks, you have access to thousands of profiles matching your targets. It then becomes easy to gather them into a database before interacting with them and presenting your services.
However, this must not be done haphazardly. Misusing LinkedIn can undermine your objectives and destroy your brand image on the web.
Follow these detailed steps in our guide to LinkedIn prospecting to become a theory expert in minutes.
Just like with emails, LaGrowthMachine allows you to create sequences solely on LinkedIn.
You can schedule 4 types of actions on LinkedIn via LaGrowthMachine: