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.
What Is B2B Prospecting In Sales?
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
B2B prospecting examples include:
- Cold calling, where sales teams reach out directly to potential customers via phone calls to introduce their product and learn more about the customers.
- Email outreach, where sales reps source the email addresses of their prospects and reach out to them with an offer.
- Social selling, where sales representatives reach out to the prospects on their social media accounts where they are most likely to be active, such as LinkedIn.
💡 Other examples of prospecting include networking events, referral programs, and account-based marketing (ABM).
What Are The Different Types of B2B Prospects
There are 3 types of prospects that sales teams should be familiar with:
- Warm prospects: These are leads who have previously engaged with your brand, such as those who have downloaded content or attended webinars.
- Cold prospects: Individuals who had no prior interaction with your company or what your solution is all about and might not even know that it exists.
- Qualified prospects: These are prospects who have been assessed using specific criteria from your ideal customer persona (ICP) and represent a promising opportunity for your sales team.
How to do B2B prospecting right
B2B prospecting is done by:
- Defining your ideal customer persona (ICP), which are the companies that would benefit the most from your solution and can afford it.
- Building your prospects list based on the ICP and then prioritizing the prospects based on which ones have the highest likelihood of converting.
- Learning more about the prospects before contacting them.
- Making an initial contact with the prospects through calling, emailing or social selling.
- Following up with your prospects and/or nurturing them to schedule a discovery call.
- Moving interested prospects to a discovery call to continue the conversation there.
Let’s go about each one of these steps in more detail: 👇
#1: Define Your Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)
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.
#2: Build Your Prospect List & Prioritize Good Leads
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:
- How close they are to your ideal customer persona.
- Whether they are a decision-maker in their organization or a junior employee.
- Whether they are facing challenges that your company can solve.
- Whether they are familiar with your organization or just learning about it.
Source: Encharge.
#3: Research Your Prospects To Pre-Qualify Them
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.
#4: Outreach To The Prospects
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:
- Cold calling, where you introduce yourself and your offer, and try to understand more about your prospect’s needs.
- Cold emailing, where you get your prospects’ emails and send them a personalized email that contains an offer.
- LinkedIn, where you chat up your prospects with InMails or through a connect request to introduce yourself.
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.
#5: Follow Up & Nurture The Prospects
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:
- Sending them ‘’your thoughts’’ on how they can resolve their problem after learning more about them,
- Sending them case studies of other clients that your organization have, which had their problems in the past.
- Sending them educational whitepapers and articles that dive deeper into the topic.
- Sending them a connect request on LinkedIn.
Consistency is key in this phase because, as per data from ValueSelling, 54% of initial meetings require more than five touchpoints to set up.
#6: Schedule a Discovery Call
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.
Qualify The Lead
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.
Equip Your Prospects To Sell Internally
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.
Your champion will repeat your pitch in meetings you’re not in. Make that easy for them:
- Send a short recap after every call with the problem, the outcome they want, and the next step on both sides.
- Share the case study that matches their situation, so they have proof to forward.
- Ask who else weighs in on the decision, and offer to prep those people too.
- Keep the deck, the pricing, and the mutual plan in one shared place, so nobody digs through an inbox to find them. A sales room works well for this.
This is the work Arrows (that’s us) does for your reps. Arrows doesn’t prospect for you. Once a prospect becomes a deal, it reads every call, email, and CRM note, keeps a gameplan built from your team’s playbook, and does the work between calls: call prep, research on the account, follow-up emails with the right case study, multi-threading to the other stakeholders, and a sales room kept current with next steps. There’s no prompt to write, and your rep approves everything before it sends.
How To Source High-Quality Leads
There are 3 main ways to source high-quality leads for your sales team:
Company & Contact Database Platforms
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.
Job Boards
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.
Trade Events In Your Industry
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: 👇
Next steps: give every new deal a gameplan with Arrows
Prospecting fills your pipeline. Deals get won in the work that comes after: the call prep, the follow-up, and the next stakeholder nobody has brought in yet.
Your reps own the prospecting. Arrows picks up once a prospect becomes a deal and does that work for them, with no prompt.
If you’re a sales leader who wants:
- A gameplan for every new deal, built from your team’s playbook.
- Call prep, account research, follow-up emails, and CRM updates done for your reps, with a rep approving each one before it sends.
- Multi-threading, every date tracked, and nudges when a deal goes quiet, all working with the CRM and notetaker you already use.
Then you can book an agent kickoff to see how Arrows works today.