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What is B2B Prospecting - A B2B Sales Perspective

By George Brontén

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Introduction

Sales prospecting is a critical part of the sales process, the lifeblood of developing new revenue for your business. It’s essential for identifying and nurturing new potential customers that may have an interest in your products or services.

Effective prospecting, as Mark Hunter highlights in 10 Best Practices for Prospecting, helps to generate a consistent flow of new business opportunities, while poor prospecting can waste time and revenue. 

In this resource, we’ll discuss what sales prospecting is and explore the different types of sales prospecting. We’ll also dive into some common prospecting problems, share the common mistakes salespeople make when prospecting, and highlight business best practices for effective prospecting. Finally, we’ll give you some tips from the prospecting trenches so you can learn down-to-earth skills and approaches from the experts sharing the latest for 2023.

Whether you’re a sales leader looking to improve your team’s overall prospecting performance, a seasoned sales professional looking to take your prospecting game to the next level, or a new salesperson looking to improve your prospecting skills, we have some additional supporting material to help you clarify. However, if it's more about Methodology or Process then skip this one but if it's understanding B2B Sales Prospecting, then read on.

 

Table of Contents



Table of Contents

In this piece on Prospecting we aim to cover as much ground as possible to make sure you get the answers you are looking for. Therefore we start by covering some of the most common questions we get. If you are eager to find a process that works for you, skip ahead to the section Prospecting as a Process 

 Define Sales Prospecting for B2B

 Two Types of Sales Prospecting

 Who Is This Sales Prospecting Page For?

 What are Some Common Prospecting Problems

 What Are the Common Mistakes Salespeople make when Prospecting?

Step-by-step Guide to Prospecting as a process:

  1. Define Your Terms
  2. Design an Effective Strategy
  3. Establish a Consistent Sales Prospecting Process
  4. Coach the Strategy and Process
  5. Analyze and Continually Improve
  6. Close the Loop with Account Growth

Bonus Material

Tips from the Prospecting Trenches

Conclusion

Define Sales Prospecting for B2B 

Gartner defines sales prospecting as “the first step of the sales process, which involves identifying and contacting potential customers.”

A quick internet search turns up similar definitions across a broad range of sources. However with the latest trends and demands on B2B today, we need to define sales prospecting in a little more detail, and break it down into its component parts to clarify and expand on the definition to make it relevant to the challenges of 2023.

Sales prospecting definition: Sales prospecting is how you initiate a sales process. It is the act of identifying, contacting, and earning the right to have dialogues with potential new customer prospects in order to find, qualify, and generate opportunities to develop new sales revenue via new customers.

Prospects that are qualified by salespeople during prospecting become opportunities that salespeople engage with during the active pipeline stages of the sales process.

The first part of a sales process: In a healthy sales system, the sales process consists of at least three key parts or workflows:

  • Prospecting
  • Active pipeline and opportunity management
  • Account management and growth

Alongside the expansion of accounts, the satisfaction and success of customers hold significant relevance in the overall approach to gaining and retaining customers.

The act of identifying, contacting, and qualifying: Sales prospecting begins with understanding who the ideal customer is, finding them either among existing accounts or a wider pool of companies and individuals, and contacting them to discover whether there is potential for them to become quality customers.

Dave Brock has a great way to identify your ideal customer.

In order to pursue new sales revenue: The goal of sales prospecting is to identify qualifying prospects and move them into the active sales pipeline so that they can be pursued for potential new sales revenue. 

Two Types of Sales Prospecting

Sales prospecting strategies and tactics are different based on the type of sales environment a sales team operates in. There are two main types of sales prospecting:

  • High-Volume Sales Prospecting
  • Complex B2B Sales Prospecting

What Is High-Volume Sales Prospecting?

In high-volume sales prospecting, there is a large pool of potential leads and prospects. High-volume sales prospecting is appropriate for companies whose products or services have a huge potential pool of buyers. Consumer products such as food, clothing, and electronics often fit this category or business-to-business products tailored for companies of any size in any industry.

This broad sales prospecting may involve mass communications and a large amount of automation. Salespeople can afford to annoy customers and burn through opportunities because there is a nearly unlimited number of potential customers to approach. Speed and volume may be more important in this setting than individual messaging, strategy, or valuable business conversations.

What is Complex B2B Sales Prospecting

In complex B2B prospecting, the pool of potential customers is much smaller and may only consist of 100,000 or 10,000, or even fewer possible companies to target. Sales cycles tend to be longer, the products or services tend to be more intrusive or disruptive, and there are more stakeholders involved in the decision-making process.

In complex B2B prospecting, salespeople can’t afford to annoy or “burn through” prospects, because there is only a limited number to work with, and potential buyers tend to share information with each other. The reputation, professionalism, skills, and personal touch of the sales prospecting team affect the outcome of overall sales results. Burning of leads is something commonly discussed and in another piece about "The Four Fastest Ways to Burn a Lead" from 2021, which Nicole covers them in more detail. 

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The quicker the response time means that the lead is likely still on your website, or maybe they are retaining some of that information in the email you just delivered before they opened 16 others, and now they’re thinking about those brands. So don’t wait to call. The longer you wait the colder the lead gets.
George Leith, Chief Customer Officer, Vendasta

Who Is This Sales Prospecting Page For?

This sales prospecting resource specifically applies to sales leaders and their teams operating in a complex B2B environment as defined by these characteristics:

  • Engaging in value-based sales with multiple stakeholders
  • Selling to a limited target audience
  • Offering products and/or services with a high impact on the customer’s existing operations
  • Subject matter expertise matters
  • Professional business relationships are important to the sale

What are Some Common Prospecting Problems?

Common prospecting problems can fall into one of four main categories:

  • Unclear positioning and value proposition
  • Individual and team effectiveness at prospecting
  • Managing sales teams within the context of the prospecting process
  • Challenges with staying current
  • Communication and collaboration across larger organizations

On this page, we discuss many of the most common problems, as well as what to do to overcome them and create a prospecting process that drives new revenue effectively.

Unclear positioning and value proposition

Unless you truly understand the challenges and aspirations of your target customers and the stakeholders you engage, you might end up in a situation where you “throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks.” Sales teams who are not equipped with clear positioning and an effective value proposition will struggle with:

  • Understanding your target audience’s challenges and aspirations
  • Having a clear and unique positioning focused on the above
  • Communicating an understanding of the customer’s challenges & aspirations

If it’s your value proposition you want to address because it's unclear for your team, check out Paul O'Donohue's piece on Testing your Value Proposition.

Individual and team effectiveness at prospecting

Common prospecting problems that salespeople and sales teams experience include:

  • Finding qualified leads
  • Obtaining accurate data for the companies and contacts within their Ideal Client Profile
  • Prioritizing the right leads to spending time with
  • Juggling prospecting along with other sales responsibilities
  • Lack of structure in how to approach prospecting
  • Lack of clarity regarding what works and what doesn’t
  • Lack of clear definition of when to qualify and place a lead into the pipeline
  • Bloated pipelines due to unqualified leads, leading to poor forecasting
  • Lack of sales prospecting conversational skills
  • Fear of picking up the phone
  • Not knowing how to break through the noise    

Managing Sales Teams Within the Context of the Prospecting process

Sales management presents many challenges, including some that are relevant to the entire sales process and some that are relevant, especially to the prospecting process. Some of these prospecting-specific problems include:

  1. Managing remote teams to ensure they are executing on the correct prospecting activities
  2. Getting visibility into what the sales team is up to
  3. Maintaining consistency in prospecting approach across multiple remote teams
  4. Avoiding overlap and miscommunications across client organizations when individual salespeople attempt to engage stakeholders within the same organizations, without collaborating effectively
  5. Managing collaboration and communication among team members when prospecting within larger organizations

Challenges with Staying Current

The world is changing at a rate none of us has experienced before. Everything from technology to the economy is operating acceleratedly, impacting how and where, and what we sell. In this fast-changing environment, staying current is critical to every aspect of the sales process, including prospecting. Some of the challenges specifically relevant to sales prospecting include:

  • Understanding the changing sales landscape
    • How people interact (human vs non-human interaction)
    • What types of communications do they respond to
    • How to reach people
    • How decisions are being made
  • Keeping up with emerging problems and questions that prospects experience and maintaining relevant messaging
  • Keeping up with the various problems and considerations that are relevant for each stakeholder within a buying decision
  • Choosing and executing the right technology tools for prospecting
  • Managing the tech stack and avoiding bloated technology syndrome (the Frankenstack)
  • Knowing when to invest, and when not to invest, in new point solution technologies

Communication and Collaboration Across Larger Organizations

Complex B2B selling often involves multiple stakeholders both within the buying organization and within the selling organization. Managing communication and collaboration both internally and with the buyer, and stakeholders present unique challenges during the prospecting process including:

  1. Understanding that there’s no such thing as “The Decision-Maker” in a complex B2B sale
  2. Mapping the stakeholder roles that will be involved in a potential decision-making process
  3. Ensuring that all necessary stakeholders are discovered and engaged with coordinated messaging and a structured approach
  4. How your product challenges buyers’ existing infrastructure; for example, related software. The bigger the organization, the more complex the infrastructure.

 

What Are the Common Mistakes Salespeople Make when Prospecting?

Many of the common sales prospecting problems discussed above can be resolved through better strategy and tactics, while others are due to common mistakes that salespeople make. Here are eight of the most common sales prospecting mistakes

Salespeople focus on the wrong prospects

When salespeople don’t clearly understand the Ideal Customer Profile and how to identify their priorities and needs, they make decisions about how to spend their time based on the wrong criteria. Often, they’ll spend the most time with the prospects that give them the “warm fuzzies”–people they like, and “think” are good prospects, but may not actually yield good sales.

Salespeople only prospect when their pipeline grows thin

Many salespeople get into an unhealthy routine of focusing on their sales prospecting only when they are running out of active pipeline opportunities. This sometimes happens because they are having trouble juggling all of their responsibilities and so they focus on the opportunities closest to closing, at the expense of developing new opportunities. The result is an inconsistent rollercoaster pipeline with sales results going up and down on a month-by-month or quarterly basis.

They annoy prospects (and damage the brand) with sleazy sales prospecting tactics.

When your market consists of the entire world, you may be able to afford to lose opportunities due to a sales team’s lack of professionalism or poor prospecting approach. In complex B2B sales with a limited market, the pool of potential prospects is smaller and communication among market stakeholders is more common. Typical spam or “shotgun” styles of prospecting can cause reputational harm. Some common harmful prospecting tactics include:

  • Automating reach-outs when you should be researching and personalizing the approach
  • Using manipulative copy and conversational approaches
  • Failing to coordinate communications, so that potential prospects receive mixed messages

 

They take advice from the wrong places

Many of the loudest voices offering sales prospecting advice at the moment are large software vendors who focus on automated consumer marketing and sales. These are the wrong places to take advice for complex B2B sales teams. You can’t afford to take advice from “experts” who don’t understand the unique needs of complex B2B sales.

They focus on the product rather than the value the customer needs to receive

Salespeople often focus too much on products or services, rather than on the needs of the clients and the jobs they need to do. Salespeople then spend a lot of time trying to “sell” prospects on products and services, instead of understanding the customer’s needs first. These salespeople enter a prospecting conversation with the assumption that their product or service is the right solution before they understand the customer’s problems and aspirations, and thereby often miss the opportunity to have a valuable conversation from the customer’s perspective, as well as the opportunity to correctly qualify or disqualify the prospect.

They fail to learn from both successes and failures

Win/loss analysis at both the deal level and the overall level is critical for salespeople and their leaders to understand and improve their prospecting efforts. It’s important to track prospecting activities and conversations to begin to understand what is working well and what can be improved. Without this, salespeople will continue wasting precious time.

Sales leaders hire the wrong people

It’s common to hire junior employees to manage the volume-heavy process of prospecting and “save money.” In complex B2B environments, this is usually a mistake. Junior salespeople usually don’t have the skills or experience to have the effective, efficient, valuable initial conversations that are needed to earn the right to deeper conversations with prospects and generate a robust and healthy pipeline.

Salespeople are afraid of picking up the phone

In the age of instant messaging, emails, and social media, many salespeople have forgotten or grown fearful of the old art of picking up the phone. Yet in complex B2B sales, often the phone is the most effective tool for quickly qualifying and moving a prospect forward. A five-minute phone call can tell a skilled salesperson whether a prospect is worth moving forward with, and establish the rapport and confidence for the buyer to want to move forward with them. A silent sales floor is a dying sales floor.

Step-by-step Guide to Prospecting as a process



Step-by-step Guide to Prospecting as a process

Introduction

Though there’s no question that times are changing, the truth is that what has always worked in complex B2B sales hasn’t changed that much. There are many new tools, but without the foundations of business best practices for sales prospecting, new tools can only become “point pollution,” cluttering up your space and your salespeople’s time.

 

The biggest problem in sales prospecting is sales leaders and teams who want results, but don’t want to roll up their sleeves and do the work to get those results. To be effective, your leaders and teams must be willing to slow down, set up the right structures, and then diligently execute on the process.

 

For those who are ready to take this on, here’s a step-by-step guide to implementing the most important business best practices for sales prospecting on your team: 

  • Define Your Terms
  • Design an Effective Strategy
  • Establish a Consistent Sales Prospecting Process
  • Onboard, Train, Upskill, and Coach the Strategy and Process
  • Analyze and Continually Improve
  • Close the Loop with Account Growth

Define Your Terms



Define Your Terms

Chapter 1

Before you can do anything else, you must have a shared language across your teams on the fundamentals of prospecting. Use these definitions, or bring your team together and define these terms in a way that makes sense for your organization.

Lead: A sales lead is anything in the universe of potential customers. It could be someone downloading a white paper, a student at a university, or someone doing research on competitors. They may not be in your ICP, all you know is that you have contact info and perhaps they’ve interacted with your organization in some way. Leads may become prospects, but only after they are qualified against your ICP. Some leads can and should be ignored.

Prospect: A prospect is a lead that someone on your team has decided is worth spending a salesperson’s time and effort to determine whether they are qualified and if they have the potential to become an opportunity.

Opportunity: An opportunity, or a sales project, is a prospect that has been qualified into the forecastable pipeline to be nurtured toward a potential sale.

These definitions are important, because without them you will always have salespeople throwing stuff into the pipeline that doesn’t belong there, and other salespeople not putting them in the pipeline until they’re past the point where they should have been.

A clear definition helps you set up systems so that every salesperson is filling the pipeline according to a consistent process. This will improve forecasting as well as overall results.

Design an Effective Strategy 



Design an Effective Strategy 

Chapter 2

Effective sales prospecting, just like sales, begins with an effective sales prospecting strategy.

First, know your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). The more clearly you define your ICP, the better your team will be at finding and qualifying prospects that are likely to close business with you.

Within your ICP companies, know who the stakeholders are for decision-making about the jobs you can help them with. Gone are the days of single decision-makers inside any company larger than a solopreneur. You need to know everyone who has any interaction with the business processes your product or service will impact.

You also need to know what their most pressing problems and big aspirations are, and how you can help. Identify these for each of the stakeholders within your ICP companies.

Refine and communicate your customer-focused messaging for your sales team to use for prospecting.

Take the time to understand your sales environment, its level of complexity, its sales cycle length, its verticals, and other key features that impact your buyers and your offering.

Align with marketing, so that there is a streamlined handoff for marketing-generated leads, and so that you can bee-swarm accounts in a coordinated way to reach all relevant stakeholders.

Define and enforce clear criteria for qualifying prospects into the pipeline.

Teach the “beats” of your ideal opening conversation with prospects, and train salespeople in the art of conversational skills.

Hire the right people for your specific ICP and sales environment, then train and coach them effectively.

To design a simple strategy, check out the work of Dave Kurlan and his piece on designing a Simple Strategy.

Establish a Consistent Sales Prospecting Process



Establish a Consistent Sales Prospecting Process

Chapter 3

Your consistent, strategic, reinforced sales prospecting process is the key to full pipelines. It will also provide you with:

  • Better forecasts
  • More consistent results
  • Higher sales performance
  • Greater ability to scale your prospecting system
  • Faster onboarding new salespeople
  • Avoiding the rollercoaster pipeline

Airlines use a consistent process with checklists to provide the safest transportation experience in the world. A sales prospecting process with milestones, enablement, steps, and checklists provides the best-performing sales pipelines.

How do you build a prospecting process? Begin by documenting clear criteria for when a prospect can be entered into the pipeline. Clear qualifying criteria ensure your sales teams are spending time and effort where it matters and will keep your pipelines clean and your forecasts accurate.

Work backward from your qualifying criteria to identify the key steps that salespeople should take to identify, reach out to, and qualify individuals within your ICP. 

Ensure that the process includes a clear and clean handoff from marketing to sales, in the case of marketing-qualified leads.

Include all stakeholders in the prospecting process, and create a clear line of communication for when and how salespeople should communicate and collaborate with other members of the sales team to engage each stakeholder.

You can use a sales prospecting process tool like Membrain’s Prospecting Module to create workflows for your salespeople to work inside during the prospecting process. Build the milestones, enablement, steps, and checklists into your tool to provide salespeople with guidance through the prospecting process.

With the potential to increase sales by 20%

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"...surgeons are not immune to missing details and cutting corners. Just as surgeons need guidance, sales leaders and team members do too."

 

George Brontén, CEO & Founder, Membrain

Coach the Strategy and Process



Coach the Strategy and Process

Chapter 4

With the prior steps in place, create hiring criteria for your sales prospecting team that aligns with the skills and abilities necessary to execute your prospecting process. If team members will be responsible for both prospecting and other aspects of the sales process, align these hiring criteria with those necessary for the other responsibilities.

Build training systems that onboard and upskill your employees with the conversational and process skills necessary to execute your prospecting process. Create coaching systems and coach the strategy and process. Both training and Coaching are crucial. 

Gretchen Gordon highlights the importance of coaching, explaining that More coaching, even poor coaching, is better than none 

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"Athletes don’t just show up for the game and make it up as they go along. Salespeople shouldn’t either"

Gretchen Gordon, CEO, Boost Profits

Analyze and Continually Improve



Analyze and Continually Improve

Chapter 5

Build win/loss and process reviews into your routine sales strategy and coaching systems. You should be routinely analyzing and improving:

  • Your prospecting cadence
  • Your prospecting messaging
  • Each salesperson’s prospecting performance and related skills
  • The helpfulness of each step, milestone, and stage in your prospecting process
  • Email open rates and the effectiveness of shared enablement content
  • Phone call connection and call completion rates

You should also be tracking data quality including phone numbers, email addresses, and websites for a given organization. Document which forms of contact are effective and which are not, and share that information across teams. However, if you are struggling with Qualifying, check out the How-to guide on creating your qualifying process. This reduces the amount of time salespeople waste on unproductive contact attempts. 

Close the Loop with Account Growth



Close the Loop with Account Growth

Chapter 6

Account growth is often called “account management” within sales organizations. It’s the art and science of working with existing clients not only to serve their needs but also to identify opportunities to help them in new ways and increase your revenue from them. Some sources refer to this as “increasing wallet share.” The best sales organizations think of account management as a means of helping their clients grow, which is why we call it account growth rather than account management.


If prospecting is the first workflow of recruiting and growing customers, then account growth is often seen as the last workflow. However, the best approach is to think of the entire set of sales-related workflows as a virtuous loop in which account growth can fuel prospecting efforts that then grow into opportunities in the pipeline and add to the size and health of the accounts that are under management.

To close the loop between account growth and prospecting:

  • Use what you know about your best accounts to identify your best prospects
  • Use what you learn about prospecting to seek more opportunities within your accounts

The qualities that make up your best prospects are not always obvious. You can analyze your best accounts to identify shared qualities that you may not know to look for in prospects. Then you can use this information to improve and tighten your ICP and increase the effectiveness of your prospecting efforts.

You can also analyze what efforts are working in prospecting to identify opportunities within existing accounts. For instance, during the prospecting process, which stakeholders are most important to connect with, what conversations drive the most action, and what early signals indicate a likely close?

Analyzing these clues against win rates provides you with a template for visualizing where prospecting opportunities exist within your highest potential accounts.

Bonus Material: 
Tips from the Prospecting Trenches



Bonus Material: 
Tips from the Prospecting Trenches

Bonus Material

The most important thing sales leaders can do to improve their salespeople’s prospecting effectiveness is to establish the right strategy and process. But when it comes down to nuts and  bolts, salespeople still have to put the effort in and do the right things. 

Here are some practical tips from the sales trenches, that salespeople can apply right away to increase their prospecting effectiveness.

Establish a cadence that you can keep up with every single day

If your only role is prospecting, it’s easy to do every day. But many salespeople are juggling prospecting along with active pipeline management and other responsibilities. For consistent effects and to avoid the “rollercoaster effect,” set targets and establish a cadence that is realistic and achievable every single day.

Make your daily prospecting targets non-negotiable, like brushing your teeth

There are some things you just do every day, no matter how busy your schedule is. Make prospecting one of these things.

Find the right balance between hyper-personalization and mass outreach

In complex B2B sales, spamming causes more problems than it solves. But if you try to get too personal, you can waste a lot of time researching candidates before you even get a chance to speak with them. Find a balance between personalizing your outreach and spamming inappropriate leads.

Check your messaging against the latest ICP guidelines

Sales and marketing leaders are responsible for ensuring that you are equipped with the latest ICP information and targeted messaging. Check in regularly to ensure the conversations you’re having are lined up with that messaging. Close the loop by communicating back to leadership which messaging points are getting you results.

Pick up the phone

It’s tempting to use messaging, texting, emails, and social media because it’s fast and allows you to reach more people faster. But one effective conversation is more valuable than twenty cold emails. The phone is still the fastest way to generate a conversation and find out if a prospect is worth pursuing.

Be clear about why you’re calling

Don’t waste a prospect’s time, and don’t leave them confused about the purpose of your call. Be prepared to speak with gatekeepers with a tight, tailored message that will reach the right ears. Collaborate with your leadership team to polish this part of your toolbox.

Be human

In the end, complex B2B sales is always human to human. Drop the corporate speak and treat each person you speak to as the person that they are.

Automate some things, but not everything

You can use automation to drive certain repetitive and routine tasks, but don’t let it take over all of your prospecting. The human element and the valuable conversations are where you will find your gold.

Know your qualifying criteria and stick to them

Don’t try to make sales outside the pre-defined qualifying parameters. You’ll waste time and chase rainbows. Qualify quickly and well, at every step.

Maintain and share records, especially regarding contact information

Reaching people by phone can be challenging, and sometimes the best number is their personal cell, if you can find it. But sometimes their personal cell goes automatically to voicemail and the best way to reach them is through the company’s main number and a warm conversation with the receptionist. Sometimes the number on record has been disconnected. Record this information somewhere that others can access it. This will save everyone a lot of time.

Conclusion



Conclusion

In conclusion, sales prospecting is an essential part of complex sales that requires both art and science to succeed. In this article, we have explored what sales prospecting is, the different types of sales prospecting, and common problems that salespeople face when prospecting. We have also shared some common mistakes that salespeople make when prospecting and provided best practices for optimizing your prospecting efforts.

As a sales professional, it's important to remember that prospecting is not a one-time event. It's an ongoing process that requires discipline, persistence, and a willingness to learn and adapt. By leveraging the tips from the prospecting trenches and implementing the best practices we've shared, you can optimize your prospecting efforts and drive more sales for your business.

Whether you're an experienced sales professional or just starting out, this sales prospecting page is designed to help you improve your prospecting skills and achieve your sales goals. At Membrain, we believe that the art and science of complex sales is essential for success, and we are committed to helping you master the skills you need to succeed in today's complex sales environment.

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