One of the Highest ROI Skills You're Ever Going to Learn — PROSPECTING
Dominating The Basics #2 - Prospecting
Introduction
Welcome back to Dominating The Basics!
This is an important one because no matter what level of your sales career you're at, from entry-level to owning your own business, this is one of the highest ROI skills you're ever going to learn — PROSPECTING.
Prospecting has slightly different definitions between organisations, usually all containing mostly the same aspects, just different cut-off points.
Some define prospecting as everything that comes before the sales call - list building, cold outreach, book meeting. This is reasonable, and we don’t see it as wrong, but we don’t use this definition.
Instead, for clarity and to show the stages of a sales cycle the reverence they deserve, we split this activity into two, seeing prospecting as the pre-awareness stage of the cycle, followed by outreach.
These first two stages Prospecting and Outreach, are the most important foundational skills in sales.
You’ve lost everything and are on the verge of homelessness; what is the quickest way to get in front of someone and sell them a service? P+O
You’re having a slow Q with no way to hit quota from your inbound leads or a new SDR that hasn’t quite figured it out yet? P+O.
You’ve got an idea for a new business and want to do some market research for free before dropping 100k to build the damn thing? P+O.
You’re an entrepreneur; the economy has taken a downward swing, and product-led growth is slowing down; there aren’t enough inbound leads, you're worried that there is no way you’ll be able to pay your employees… P+O!
Get the gist? Good, lets go…
At a top line, prospecting requires an understanding of your Total Addressable Market (TAM), Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), and typical procurement process within your industry.
The process is then of finding these people, researching them and their company, collecting contact information and processing all of this data into a usable format - contact lists, spreadsheets, contacts in a CRM report, Everyone into a sequence etc.
Prospecting should include Strategy, research, and creation.
Strategy
So let’s talk about how to approach prospecting.
We see a lot of new and old reps who don’t fully grasp how this should be done and the fact that there is more to it than just searching LinkedIn and finding people.
What we want to teach you is that your entire sales strategy needs to work together as an engine. If one part is out of place or underperforming, the whole thing breaks down and bowtiedgreesemonkey isn’t going to be able to fix this one.
If you put too much emphasis on outreach without giving prospecting the respect it deserves, you’ll have a boiler room setup with reps burning out on 300+ calls a day with 0-2 meetings booked - then those meetings don’t close because they aren’t qualified - shit.
If you put all your emphasis on prospecting and too little on outreach, you won’t have enough meetings to feed the engine; all of it will be worthless.
Too much focus on engagement and you’ll be twiddling your thumbs waiting for customers to come to you. Then when they do, you’re so fucking scared they won’t close since they’re the only person you are speaking to, you’ll sound desperate and they run for the hills.
Our upcoming content will teach a fully integrated process - ensuring you don’t run into these issues but for now, let’s talk the strategy of prospecting, so that you can feed the engine the right mix.
Your Market
The first step to prospecting is understanding who you should be looking for. If you don’t define your target market specifically, you will be shooting in the dark. Not gonna make it behaviour.
The above graph shows the top line of TAM, SAM, and TM.
A quick rundown on each would be:
TAM, or Total Addressable Market, is the total market demand for a product or service. It represents the revenue opportunity for a company if it were to capture 100% of the market.
SAM, or Serviceable Available Market, is the portion of the TAM that a company can realistically target and serve. It represents the market that a company can realistically pursue.
A target market is a specific group of consumers that a company has identified as the primary audience for its products or services. It is a subset of the SAM.
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed representation of a company's ideal customer. It typically includes demographics, behaviours, needs, and pain points. An ICP helps a company to focus its marketing efforts on the customers that are most likely to convert and become loyal, long-term customers.
When prospecting you need to have a very strong grasp on these concepts. Wasted time here causes problems all the way down the line of the sales cycle - everything must be holistically in sync. Ideally your company should have detailed information on exactly who your ICP and target market are, but that is very often not the case. So let's look at how you, as a sales rep, can find and define your target market and ICP.
Finding your ideal customer profile (ICP) and target market involves conducting research and analyzing customer data.
Analyze your current customer base: Look at the characteristics of your current customers, including demographics, behaviours, and pain points. This will give you a good idea of who is buying your products or services. Dive deep into your CRM and internal notes for this one.
Identify customer segments: Based on the information you've gathered, divide your customers into segments. This will help you identify patterns and commonalities among your customers. This is often by vertical/size, but whatever is most meaningful.
Ask your coworkers: Reach out to more experienced reps and ask them about the best prospect’s needs, pain points, and preferences. This will give you a deeper understanding of what they're looking for in a product or service.
Analyze your competitors: Look at the customers of your competitors to see if there are any segments that you're not currently reaching.
Define your ICP: Use the information you've gathered to define your ideal customer profile. This should include demographics, behaviours, needs, and pain points.
Identify your target market: Based on your ICP, identify the specific group of customers that you want to target. This will be a subset of your ICP.
Test and validate: This is what we’re never going to stop doing, every call you have you’re building up more data on what each prospect believes. Take extensive notes on everything you do.
Procurement Process
Understanding the standard procurement process within an industry is crucial for sales reps who are prospecting. Knowing the process will help you identify the key decision-makers and stakeholders within a company, as well as the steps that are typically taken before a purchase is made.
This knowledge will allow you to tailor your approach and messaging to align with the expectations and needs of the prospect. Additionally, understanding the standard procurement process will also provide insight into the length and complexity of the sales cycle, allowing you to better manage time and resources.
Ultimately, having a clear understanding of the standard procurement process will enables reps to more effectively reach and engage potential customers and increase the chances of a deal closing.
Note: “Procurement processes” may be as simple as a single call where you send them a contract to sign, or may be months of legal redlining.
Top Down vs. Bottom Up
Now that we know our ideal customer profile, target market, the decision-makers, and internal stakeholders that are most often present in our deals, how do we get into the account?
Let’s look at two tactical options.
The first being do we go top down or bottom up - the simple answer is top down.
To explain you want to go for the top decision maker for your product first every time. They may brush you off and force you down the ladder (We will do separate trainings on how to deal with that) but it’s important to start there. Having a DM on any call increases the chance of a deal closing more than any other factor. Lower-ranking employees are also more likely to be spiteful and try to ruin your deal if you try to go bottom up, then go over their heads when they turn you down. Higher-ranking execs likely don’t give a shit.
It would be better to try getting referrals from similar level or higher executives if you can’t break into a department before going down the chain.
Bi-Directional
The second tactical choice is based on account size. If you’re working with enterprise accounts, there may be a need to create groundswell interest in your product before managing to get a meeting.
One tactic we made was to automate groundswell marketing into end-user contacts within your target account. These are automated emails (Think account-based marketing) that are focused on providing value to the lower-ranked prospects. Give them information and resources that will improve their lives and get them to remember your company.
Then on the complete opposite end, you want no automation, direct outreach to the higher-up prospects- Head of and above - focusing on pain and aiming for a meeting. When your company eventually gets brought up in a meeting, you’re getting closer and closer to a win.
This tactic works for larger companies that you’re having trouble breaking into.
These two decisions are important because you then decide which contacts you need to find. Once that's decided, we can jump into the basics of doing the actual prospecting!
Basic Prospecting
What do we know?
We know our target market, can define our ICP, and now know the specific people in the accounts we’re looking at that we want to contact!
This is exactly where we want to be. We’re going to look at old methods briefly, we will go into modern tools and prospecting methods next, but knowing these options is important, you may need them one day when tools aren’t an option.
The only things left are collecting information about our prospects and finding their contact details.
Historically we would find the reception phone number or reverse engineer their email (If we google and find that the typical format is First.last@company.com, we can guess what our prospect’s email is), and sometimes this is still the case.
Research is different for each person; we like to suggest 3 minutes per account on research, find any writing by the prospect, any press releases or news that relate to the problem or concept your product/service is related to and save it. Only need to do it once, and do it right. 3 minutes, 3 pieces of information, move on.
From there save their name, title, company, phone number, email, and research into a spreadsheet. This is your lead list and will be used to contact - then add several fields next for last call made, last email sent, outreach notes.
If worst comes to worst, your company refuses to invest in tools, and you’re too broke to use our DIY tool stack, do this; you can make millions on manual prospect tracking, as many have before.
That being said, it is not efficient and doesn’t have a lot of the things we use in the modern world to improve your prospecting and outreach, so lets look into them!
Prospecting Tools
There are a number of tools designed to make this manual process a lot easier. From B2B databases, to buying intent data. Let’s look into this.
First, the main must have in a modern world, a B2B Sales Database. These tools maintain large databases of prospect data including names, titles, companies, contact details and a lot more. These are designed to maximize the efforts of prospectors by presenting everything they need in a smart searchable format.
The main examples of these are:
Most of these tools in this class will offer features like filters (company, title, location, company headcount, department headcount, etc) to drill down on exactly who you want to find - use this to filter down to only your target market and ICP. Tools like Linkedin Sales nav have features like Boolean Search, where you can use operators to filter results, you can find info here: https://www.linkedin.com/help/sales-navigator/answer/a168061/using-boolean-search-on-sales-navigator?lang=en
Triggers
These tools do more than just provide smart search capabilities - although these are already exponentially more efficient than manual list building, there is a lot more on offer.
Now that we’re looking into the advanced concepts of prospecting, we should look into prospect buying cycles.
There is a difference between a sales cycle and a buying cycle is that a sales cycle is something you need to be active in, it is an engagement with a defined beginning and end. The buyer cycle is more passive.
A buyer will usually feel a trigger that evokes enough of a reaction to begin discussing/considering how to solve it. If there is not a suitable solution already in existence or their current system doesn’t do the job well enough, they will enter active evaluation - the active portion of the cycle, but once the solution is chosen, that customer is out of the market for the length of that contract, passively getting experience from their decision with no interest or resources to procure your (hopefully) better solution. When that contract is nearing its end (And we’re going to assume there are no opt-out periods here), there will either have been or is a trigger that will start the evaluation process again, or skip it, renew and go back off the market into passive hibernation again.
Now there is a lot more complexity to this, but we’re not going to go into it here, we will be doing a deep dive into our upcoming dominating sales development course. For our purpose today, this will do.
This illustrates that there are GOOD times to reach out to a prospect and BAD times to reach out. We can track things that increase the chances of our outreach being successful. This is advanced prospecting.
One thing to track is contract cycles - whenever you speak to someone using a competitor, write down when the best time to reconnect based on their contract end date will be.
Another is job changes - when an executive changes jobs, they're more likely to have a fresh budget to use and a need to prove their worth by implementing large changes (Like your software). As well with job changes, if an existing user of your product moves to a new company, there is a much better chance they will want to bring it with them, as behaviour change is hard and learning new tools is as well. Reach out to both.
Other important triggers you can track include: Funding events, Synergistic software procurement, hiring increases, M&A, Role changes, and news events.
What you want to do is set up your prospecting tool like apollo or ZoomInfo to track these on your target accounts, or get a dedicated software like Triggr.
Intent
Intent is another advanced concept in prospecting. Intent signals help identify which companies are actively researching your solution or solutions to a problem you solve before you ever speak to the prospect. This can be what they're searching for online, looking at competitors (G2 Intent data is good), and engagement on different platforms, there are dedicated intent data platforms, but Apollo and ZoomInfo both offer them internally.
Parting Thoughts on Prospecting
Follow Jeb Blount’s 30-Day Rule
“The 30-Day rule says that your 30 days of prospecting efforts pay off in the next 90 days. It is a simple rule but it is a powerful one and you should not ignore it. Missing one day of prospecting will cost you in the next 90 days. Not prospecting for a week will affect your commission and missing prospecting for a whole month can mess up with your pipeline and push you into a slump. 90 days later you won’t know how you landed there.”
Never Stop Prospecting, for every no and every yes you MUST replace that prospect and account with another, or your pipe will dry up.
DIY Tech Recommendation
Ideally, your company will provide you with prospecting tools - B2B budgets can afford the best.
If they don’t have their own use Apollo.io for $99/month. We’ve partnered with them (Yes this is sponsored) to give you deep dives into the sales process like this. We’ll be using it to discuss outreach in the next post.
Apollo is a tool we’ve been paying for ourselves for a long time because, moving between companies, there are varying levels of software setups, and we don’t risk missing targets based on bad tech stacks. Our time is important, so we keep it as efficient as possible.
Summary
If you want to be successful in sales or build your own SaaS business, get comfortable with prospecting, it's non-negotiable. We’ll be back soon with more.
Best, Dingo