What Rules Your B2B Sales Prospecting Process in a Digital Era?

According to HubSpot, approaching prospects is one of the biggest challenges that today's salespeople face, scoring 37%. 

It seems that only 17% of a salesperson's day is spent on prospecting and researching leads. The rest of their time is spent on writing emails (21%), entering data (17%), going to internal meetings (12%), and on scheduling calls for another 12%.

The time spent on these activities can sometimes interfere with your business' goal of having an effective prospecting process that will eventually generate more revenue quicker. In a previous article, we discussed how a sales enablement strategy could help your team with that. 

Why your prospecting process should keep up with the digital transformation? 

In the beginning, we mentioned how critical the time spent on every day's activities are. To underpin this idea, it is essential to remember the fast-paced digital transformation we are experiencing. 

The online environment was already transforming into the go-to place where businesses meet with their customers, and from where they can gather relevant data about the customer's behavior. With the pandemic outbreak, this trend has settled, and it seems like it's here to stay for a long time. 

Therefore, it makes sense why your business should invest in sales prospecting tools that can maximize the potential of your business strategy. To ensure that the tools you have chosen will bring you the expected results, you should start by gathering input from your employees.

They are the ones that can make you understand where things can be improved, and what tools are the right solution for these problems.

In recent years, our team has been continuously working on gathering internal information to understand where we can bring improvements, and so we did. The tools we are using now have offered the sales and marketing teams more efficiency, and they proved to be as useful for our customers as well. 

To share our experience with the B2B prospecting process, we are now getting ready to start the B2B Prospecting Academy, which will have its launch on the 15th of September.  

As an overview, we will discuss a few things that are relevant for your B2B prospecting processes, such as tools that are recommended by most B2B marketers and salespeople, and the essential requirement of growing a healthy B2B sales pipeline, by going through the complete sales prospecting framework.  

Cover the entire prospecting cycle with these tools

• Building your prospect list

How can you build accurate, elaborate lists of prospects and be efficient at the same time? Technology nowadays is offering us the best methods. Automation is one of the most used technologies amongst salespeople and marketers since it solves the top-of-mind problem that most of us have: time. 

One example is the LinkedIn Sales Navigator tool, which provides an extensive and accurate list of prospects. At the same time, you can reduce a massive amount of time working on this kind of activity.

• Finding contact details

Prospect.io is an excellent sales automation platform used by many sales teams looking for innovation within their processes. What makes this tool so compelling is the possibility to integrate it with Salesforce or HubSpot Sales. 

• Qualifying prospects

If your sales team is highly interested in finding more information about the communication style of a prospect, Crystal Knows is a good option for them. 

This tool can analyze public data and develop the prospect's unique personality profile, especially in terms of their communication preferences. Using this tool can help your team better prepare its pitch and increase the chances of closing more deals—all of that by using their unique algorithm, details for you that person's unique personality profile. 

• Having meetings

From a customer-centric perspective, now it's easier than ever to meet their expectations of time availability. With Doodle, you can arrange meetings convenient for prospects, since they can nominate the best time for them. 

• Engaging your prospect

When it comes to engaging your prospects, various tools can optimize your team's efficiency and the prospects' overall experience. From tools like Boomerang, HubSpot Sales, Close.io, or standard tools like Skype, you should choose the perfect mix that will facilitate your sales team processes. 

Why is consistency such a valuable asset for B2B sales teams? 

Building a strong B2B sales pipeline means working with consistency, and you most probably have noticed how constantly working on the sales activities will help you achieve your team's primary goal.

A fact that shows the vitality of consistent contact with these activities is the time spent by 72% of sales managers to hold sales pipeline review meetings with the sales representatives. And that a few times per month. The more your business focuses on the sales pipeline's human resources, the more you will increase your chances of growing a thriving business.

For your business to achieve that goal, you should have a deep understanding of how the consistency of your sales pipeline profoundly influences the customer acquisition process. 

From managing prospects to monitoring your pipeline progress once your prospects are getting closer to becoming customers, you can experience some significant improvements from your sales team, depending on which one of these activities are the ones that require the most attention.  

Final thoughts 

If you want to learn more about how we are managing and constantly improving our B2B sales prospecting process and how you can benefit from practical prospecting tools, get in touch with us, or register for our B2B Prospecting Academy! 

Remember that hiring an external marketing team most of the time can bring you more benefits and opportunities than you would expect. You can also check our article to find out more about the benefits of an external marketing team.