B2B companies worldwide rely on effective outreach strategies to target their audiences, grow brand presence in the market, and acquire more revenue. B2B prospecting is an essential process through which organizations identify interested buyers and close more deals.
However, ineffective prospecting strategies can cause a significant resource drain while causing your sales reps to waste time chasing leads who aren’t looking for your solutions. Worse yet, you could lose out on potential customers as they remain stagnant in your sales funnel.
Learn more about B2B prospecting, effective strategies, and the best prospecting tools in the market you can leverage to drive growth and better ROI.
What is B2B Prospecting?
B2B prospecting is a process where sales reps must identify, communicate, and nurture potential buyers into paying customers by guiding them through the various stages of their sales funnel.
B2B sales prospecting requires extensive research, outreach, and patience. According to Hubspot, sales reps waste about 50% of their time on ineffective prospecting caused by incorrect prospecting techniques, wrong target audience, generic cold emails, etc.
Benefits of B2B Prospecting
Although B2B prospecting is a relatively tricky process to master, the benefits of an effective strategy are far greater for any organization in terms of revenue generation and creating long-standing business relationships with returning customers.
Here are the benefits of a robust prospecting strategy:
- Sales and marketing teams can acquire quality customers for your pipeline with B2B lead prospecting, leading to faster conversion rates and increased revenue.
- B2B prospecting enables you to understand your target audience through extensive research. The insights can be utilized to create content that drives value and identify clients ready to make a purchase.
- You can better curate your sales pipeline to include prospects with buying interest for faster sales cycles and disqualify individuals not looking for your product or service.
- Sales Development Reps (SDRs) can benefit from prospecting data by enabling them to calculate the Total Accessible Market (TAM).
7 B2B Prospecting Methods That Skyrocket Your ROI
Now that we understand “What is B2B prospecting?”, let’s look at the methods you can implement to supercharge your B2B lead prospecting process and gather more revenue:
Cold Calling
Cold calling refers to directly calling prospects who have not communicated with your organization yet to help them identify their requirements, educate them about your brand offering, and successfully convert or introduce them into your sales funnel.
However, cold calling can also be one of a sales rep’s most challenging and frustrating experiences. Despite the numerous rejections and failed conversions, cold calling is one of the most effective B2B prospecting ideas.
Follow this guide to make your cold calling experience a lot easier:
- Extensive research on prospects and a deep understanding of the ICP and buyer persona can enable you to remain flexible in your brand offering. You can adapt to your prospects’ questions and initial reluctance by providing accurate answers.
- Create a cold calling script that you can reference without narrating it word for word.
- Experiment and identify the best time to conduct cold calls that provide the best conversions (No one likes a sales pitch on a Monday morning, after all!).
- Leverage sales intelligence tools and CRM systems to record, store, and analyze interactions with prospects for better insights into how you can approach your prospects effectively.
- Prioritizing informing your buyers instead of pushing them to make a purchase decision can help reinforce customer loyalty with prospects who trust your brand for solutions, eventually leading them to choose you when making a purchase.
Email Marketing
Outbound emails hold much potential for supporting successful B2B prospecting campaigns to convert leads in the middle-of-the-funnel (MoFU) or are not ready to buy yet.
Cold emailing is carried out when you send emails to a potential buyer who hasn’t interacted with your company yet with specific content and messaging to analyze their response and gauge their interest in your solutions.
Warm emailing is done for prospects who have interacted with your company in some way before. You can target these recipients with drip campaigns and re-engagement. Emails are an excellent way to present your brand offering and solutions visually.
However, emails also have a low open rate and an even lower click-through rate. Without effective personalization, visualizations, or relevant content, you risk your prospects never opening your emails.
Ensure your subject line is catchy and the email has several call-to-action (CTA) buttons that guide the reader to different landing pages and content where they can learn more about your company.
Using email automation tools can significantly reduce the time it takes to search for prospects, personalize your email, incorporate visuals, and conduct drip and re-engagement campaigns to ensure an optimal automated email B2B prospecting system.
Outreach Videos
With the ever-decreasing attention spans of consumers today, spreading your brand offering in video format ensures better audience retention and keeps your brand offering memorable.
B2B video prospecting can be conducted by sending them website links through emails or posting them on social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., where you can present your solutions engagingly.
Incorporate proper CTAs within the videos and towards the end to guide your viewers to the action you want them to take for better audience engagement with your brand and to nurture them into qualified leads.
Direct Mail
Sending letters and postcards to prospects who have interacted with your brand by providing their residential addresses is an effective method of keeping your solutions memorable for far longer than your competitors.
“Snail mail” enables you to bypass the possibility of your prospects losing your emails amongst the clutter of thousands of emails they receive on a daily basis and opens up opportunities for a smoother first interaction.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strong pillar of inbound marketing. Creating content that drives value while providing more information for your customer’s questions before they make a purchase builds customer trust and asserts your authority in the market.
Blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, etc., can be created and published to target prospects that fit your ICP to help them in their buyer’s journey. Content marketing provides a softer sell than a cold sales pitch, enabling your prospects to trust your solutions.
Valuable content lets you know what your clients are looking for in the market and informs you of the material you need to start an effective conversation before you propose solutions to fix their pain points.
Webinars
Conducting events and webinars on platforms like LinkedIn is a wildly effective method of acquiring more prospects, growing your brand presence and asserting yourself as the best solution for your client’s pain points in your niche.
Webinars can provide informational content through product demos, videos, PowerPoints, etc., focusing on a single topic related to the client’s pain points.
While LinkedIn webinars are initially challenging to attract attendees, you can generate more awareness with promotion strategies that include advertising, email marketing, engaging content, etc.
Live webinars can also ensure your viewers are engaged with you in real-time, and successful webinars can help you acquire warm leads who are willing to hear more from you after they provide their contact information.
Conferences and Meetings
Finally, you can utilize conferences and meetings to meet other like-minded professionals and key decision-makers. You can communicate with them directly, understand the obstacles they go through, and offer your solutions.
Meetings are a simple way to find prospects for your sales funnel that fit your ICP. However, arranging online meetings with expert leads can be difficult, as your sales strategy might get too expensive or ineffective when trying to reach particular clients.
You leverage tools like Fozzie to guarantee your brand stands out from the crowd while ensuring you aren’t causing a resource drain by costing a fraction of the price to have an online meeting with verified LinkedIn prospects.
Top 3 Tools To Simplify Your B2B Prospecting Strategy
Manually implementing a B2B sales prospecting strategy can be difficult, not to mention expensive. To reach prospects faster without surpassing your budget, you can use a B2B prospecting tool to ease the process. Here are my top 3 recommendations:
Fozzie
Fozzie is an easy-to-use B2B prospecting tool where you can search for executive leads across various industries and job titles to schedule meetings. We enable you to cut down on the cost of sales outreach methods by interacting with key decision-makers directly.
You can present your brand offerings to high-value prospects in target companies by scheduling meetings with your choice of LinkedIn verified contacts paying fixed rates starting at just $1, making Fozzie a cost-effective alternative to traditional sales methods.
You can search for prospects individually by typing out their name or using filters provided for “Company Size,” “$ Range,” “Job Title,” “Role,” and “Industry” categories.
B2B prospects can be guided through your sales funnel faster after presenting your brand offering through a meeting. You can send a direct message request to your choice of contacts. The contact’s fee will be deducted after the meeting has concluded successfully.
If you’re an expert in your industry, you can sign up for our platform and select your pricing for Fozzie to start attending meetings with interested sales and marketing reps. We also offer native integrations to Calendly and Pledge.to.
Calendly
Calendly is a free B2B prospecting tool enabling you to schedule meetings without sending several emails.
Booking meetings on Calendly is extremely simple. You only need to update your calendars before you can send your recipient a Calendly link. They can book a meeting slot on a day that suits their schedule and attend the meeting on the specified date.
However, Calendly is free when you are using their Basic pricing plan. Larger teams requiring more meetings must pay for every seat monthly, making it a costlier alternative.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a B2B prospecting tool LinkedIn offers on its platform to simplify the process of building prospect lists based on their job titles and responsibilities.
With LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can leverage their database to find prospects and filter them based on your ICP to search for leads you can convert effectively.
The prospecting tool lets you spend credits on InMail for better outreach strategies and recommends high-quality leads.
Like Calendly, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be expensive for smaller organizations and offers limited integrations.
Conclusion
B2B prospecting is an essential step for companies to take if they want to fill their sales pipelines with leads ready to convert. Effective B2B prospecting strategies can grow your brand presence and generate more revenue.
While ineffective prospecting strategies can lead to a resource drain, you can follow the 7 best B2B prospecting methods described in this article to implement the process and see gradual improvements in your conversions as you close deals faster.
Fozzie helps you communicate with key decision-makers in your industry by letting you schedule meetings starting at just $1, where you can present your sales pitch and introduce them into your sales funnel as a qualified lead.
Foster better collaboration with influential figures in the market and grow your brand with Fozzie today!
