Shifting the focus of your prospecting from quantity to quality

Hello Sales Reset Community

How will it feel when you have more opportunities in your pipeline than you need? 😀

When you have a surplus of opportunities, you’ll be able to cherry-pick the best ones. You’ll invest your precious selling time developing proposals only in your chosen opportunities, where win probabilities are highest.

That’s the goal of effective prospecting, the theme of our Weekly Sales Reset.

Prospecting: Quantity vs Quality

For many years, B2B prospecting has assumed that more is better—more emails, calls, and activity. “Throw enough at the wall, and some of it will stick.”

And in the last few months, automated AI-based prospecting has accelerated everything.

But your prospects are on the receiving end of all this stuff! And they’re filtering out more and more approaches faster and with less and less thought.

Suddenly, everybody needs to get much better at prospecting. The key to success is quality, not quantity.

Here are your options:

1. Quantity: Bang out ten or twenty generic approaches to prospects with the hope of getting one success.

2. Quality: Become so skilled with your prospecting that you achieve a one-in-one success ratio with every approach!

Some Assumptions

For today’s newsletter, we’re making some significant assumptions about your prospecting:

1. Time: You’ve budgeted enough time for prospecting.

2. ICP: You’ve clarified your ideal customer profile (ICP).

3. Organisations: You’ve identified enough organisations that fit your ICP.

4. Contacts: You’ve found the people in these organisations you need to approach through research on their websites, LinkedIn, and elsewhere.

5. Approach Methods: You’re skilled in the full range of ways to approach prospects:

   • Phone calls

   • Emails

   • LinkedIn InMails, DMs or comments on their posts

   • Personalised videos

   • Introductions via a shared contact

   • In-person meetings and events

That’s a lot of assumptions!

After all this heavy lifting, skipping the next critical step can be too easy.

Why should they invest their valuable time with you?

Before approaching your prospects, you must identify what value you can bring to them. Ideally, they will get value from investing time with you, regardless of whether or not they buy from you.

Here are some prompts to help you identify areas of potential value you might bring to them:

• Current Priorities: In researching this person, what have you learned about their likely top priorities and how you might help?

• Insights: What market or sector-specific insights can you share that they might find valuable?

• Stories: What stories and experiences can you share from your other customers that this prospect might find valuable?

• Outcomes: What evidence can you share about the reported outcomes other customers have achieved with your products and services?

• Access: What access can you give them to thought leaders and subject matter experts?

• COACHING: Here’s the very best value you can bring. At Sales Reset, we believe that coaching customers is the most powerful selling skill you can develop. From what you’ve learned in your research, how can you coach this prospect to work out something valuable for themselves?

Instead of banging out ten or twenty generic approaches in a prospecting session, invest the time required to investigate one carefully chosen situation more thoroughly.

Do all the research you need to prepare an approach to your prospect they simply can’t refuse!

In your mid-week newsletter, we’ll review how to use all your research to craft the most effective prospecting approaches.

Invitation to Weekly Sales Reset Stories - LIVE! online

Starting this week, we’re running a weekly session in our FREE Sales Reset Together community from 16:30 to 17:15, UK time.

The session is designed to allow participants to share their experiences and stories about each Weekly Sales Reset theme. This week, the theme is prospecting.

We’ll be HUGELY interested to hear your experience and stories!

Click here to join the community and learn more about the session this coming Tuesday.

Strongly Recommended Book

We strongly recommend this book: Outbound Sales: A data-backed playbook for cold email, cold calling, social selling, and more

It was published only at the start of this month and effectively describes current best practices in prospecting.

It’s available for a very low price on Amazon and again, is highly recommended.

In the meantime, have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

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