Wondering what B2B prospecting is and how you can do it the right way to secure more deals for your organization?
Allan Formigoni
January 13, 2025
•
8 mins
No matter how good your product or service is, without an effective sales prospecting and outreach strategy, your team will have to depend on word-of-mouth and inbound leads only.
In this guide, we’ll go over what B2B sales prospecting is, the different types of prospects, and how you can do B2B prospecting right in 2025.
B2B prospecting is the process of identifying and reaching out to potential customers for your organization to generate more revenue.
Prospecting involves researching and pre-qualifying prospects to figure out if they are a fit for your solution.
After that, sales teams reach out to these prospects via email, phone, during events, or other means of contact, such as on social media.
➡️ B2B prospecting is important because sales teams want to ensure a consistent flow of qualified leads and an optimized B2B sales process, which will help them close more deals.
B2B prospecting examples include:
💡 Other examples of prospecting include networking events, referral programs, and account-based marketing (ABM).
There are 3 types of prospects that sales teams should be familiar with:
B2B prospecting is done by:
Let’s go about each one of these steps in more detail: 👇
The first step to building your prospecting funnel is to define your ideal customer persona (ICP).
You want to understand as much as possible about your prospects' pain points, wants, and desires so you can personalize your messaging to them.
You can then document your findings and create a document that outlines your ideal customer persona.
➡️ You can refine your ICP by conducting user interviews and running surveys of ideal prospects to get a better understanding of them.
Source: Pipedrive.
💡 If your brand has been in business for a while already, you can build your ideal customer persona by looking at your existing customer base.
For example, you can see which customers converted easily, or had short sales cycles.
These will also be B2B customers that have been with you for a long time.
After defining your ICP, you want to start creating a targeted list of potential customers you can reach out to.
➡️ To do that, you can use presale tools like Cognism or Warmly to generate lists of companies that have either already visited your website or are decision-makers in a specific industry.
Your goal is to prioritize the good leads based on their industry, company size, revenue, and how much you think they’ll benefit from your offer.
Prospect prioritization can be done by setting criteria for lead scoring, such as:
Source: Encharge.
After having your prospect list at hand, the next step is to gather as much relevant information about them as possible.
Your goal is to find their business model, potential pain points, competitors, and connection points that you can use during the outreach process.
💡 To find that information, you can look through their LinkedIn profiles and the company’s website.
You can also look for mutual connections and trigger events, such as if something has happened to their company.
After all, during the outreach, you want to send out a message that is as relevant as possible, so spending a few minutes of your time to look through your prospects’ profiles is worth it.
The next step is to start reaching out to the prospects that you’ve done your basic due diligence.
You can reach out to your prospects via:
Personalization is key in this stage of the B2B prospecting process.
As Alex Hormozi puts it in his Instantly interview, you need to make your prospects feel like you are speaking to them and not to everyone.
💡 During the outreach phase, you want to keep your prospects interested by maintaining the conversation about their challenges, and not that much about your solution.
Your sales team can ask open-ended questions and try to gain a deeper understanding of your prospects’ problems.
The goal is to have a meaningful conversation with high-intent prospects that could lead to them resolving their challenges.
If prospects do not pick up the call or do not respond to your emails, you can try again at a different time.
If the prospects did pick up the call or responded positively to your message on LinkedIn, you want to continue building on the relationship and maintain contact with them.
You can send follow-up emails and calls based on your leads’ engagement and previous conversations with your sales team.
💡 To further nurture them, you can send them helpful resources that can help them resolve their challenges while building your reputation with them.
This includes:
Consistency is key in this phase because, as per data from ValueSelling, 54% of initial meetings require more than five touchpoints to set up.
After you’ve nurtured your prospects with educational resources and built some initial rapport with them, you can try and schedule a discovery call with them.
The goal is to confirm if they fit your ideal customer persona, and then present to them your tailored solution.
To prepare for the conversation, you can revisit their social media profiles, company website, and all of the available information you have on their situation so you can be prepared.
Now that the prospect is on the call with your sales team, you can use the CHAMP framework to figure out if they really are a good fit for your brand.
💡 The CHAMP framework stands for Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization and aims to let you identify if they are the decision-maker in their company, confirm their challenges, and confirm their ability to afford the solution.
Source: Selling Signals.
Since this is B2B and it’s likely that there are multiple decision-makers included in the deal, your sales team needs to equip prospects with the means to sell your solution internally.
To do that, you can send out personalized digital sales room software like Arrows (that’s us).
Sales rooms are a centralized place where your sales team and prospects can collaborate and access content together that is relevant to the deal cycle to streamline the sales process.
You can equip your sales development representatives with everything that they need to close your high-intent leads, such as:
💡 You can replicate your champions by using templates to enforce a winning process.
Your sales team can simplify follow-ups by replacing the traditional email with personalized sales rooms without having to overwhelm prospects with links.
Arrows sales rooms can be set up from any existing deal once activated in your HubSpot account.
You can then edit and publish the sales rooms directly through the Arrows app, customizing each room to your clients.
Your sales team will then receive updates on room engagement, including views and updates, via the deal’s activity feed.
💡 It is possible to link sales rooms in email snippets sent from your HubSpot account, keeping everything connected.
➡️ Our customers achieve a 44% higher win rate with our digital sales room software compared to the average win rate for deals over the last 12 months.
Roobrik has transformed its post-demo process by changing its approach from a generic feature and resource ‘’dump’’ to a more dynamic and collaborative workspace with Arrows sales rooms.
The brand is now able to close more high-value deals by delivering a unified user journey – from the first touch to ongoing customer success.
Learn more about how they did it with Arrows: 👇
There are 3 main ways to source high-quality leads for your sales team:
Your organization can source high-quality leads for your prospect list from company and contact databases, which can provide you with (mostly) up-to-date phone numbers and emails for your prospects.
Platforms like ZoomInfo and Dealfront can provide you with prospect lists using filters, such as job titles, industries, and seniority level.
➡️ You should choose contact database software that is GDPR-compliant, which means that they are complying with applicable privacy regulations to ensure that the data has not been collected illegally.
Your sales team can source high-intent leads from job boards by looking at companies that are hiring for a specific role.
For example, if you are selling digital marketing software, you can see companies hiring for digital marketers on LinkedIn Jobs.
That means they’re likely to have the budget and need for your product. You can then reach out to the hiring manager and pitch your solution to them.
Lastly, you can source quality leads from trade events and industry associations since they often list their members on their websites.
That’ll allow you to learn about partner organizations, contributors, and other executives who will be joining the events.
Here’s an example of the participating companies in the MarTech summit in London last year: 👇
After the B2B prospecting process, you can equip your prospects with the information they need to sell your solution internally.
Our sales rooms help your team keep prospective clients engaged with mutual action plans, resource sharing and milestone tracking.
Apart from that, Arrows offers separate purpose-built onboarding plans and client portals that help you manage the entire new client lifecycle out of one platform.
If you’re a sales leader looking for a sales enablement solution that offers:
Then you can schedule a demo to learn more about Arrows sales rooms.
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