Today, we’re going to be talking about creative ways to engage prospects and whether or not you are engaging your prospects in 4 key areas. To ensure that your organisation is capitalising on all of its leads and being vigilant when it comes to finding new ones, you need to know how to engage prospects as well as what’s the best way to reach out to prospects.
In our last article, we discussed the tools you can use to refine your business planning skills for 2021, and the logical progression, now, is to ask which clients and prospective clients are going to take us on that journey?
Think about that for a moment – who will it be and how will you engage with them?
COVID-19 has put many businesses in the tough position of choosing what to cut, rather than where to invest. But never forget that businesses are still looking for products and services that can help them adapt quickly and become more resilient- as well as plan for a post-pandemic future.
So, here are some of the best ways to engage with prospects…
This gives sales teams a big opportunity to fill that gap and build a long-term relationship.
In our group of companies – Best Practice Biz – we have broken through our benchmark and generated over-and-above our predicted pipeline revenue opportunities… all without cold calls and email templates.
But, it didn’t happen overnight… We achieved these by focusing on three things that help us engage and connect with every lead we have.
Here’s how we did it, with the aim of engaging prospects in 4 key areas.
Click here for more information on a Business Improvement Workshop facilitated by the Next Practice Edcuation team
Set the TONE for the Week Ahead
Many people forget that selling is a team sport, especially where business development is concerned. That’s why, with our team, we start each week with Sales Pipeline & Hot Deals Review, which focuses on the following areas:
Targets: Where do you currently stand with prospects?
Objectives: What are you committing to this week?
New: What tactics or strategies are you testing out, and what are the methods behind them? What are the key takeaways? What are the objections you are dealing with? What is working/ what is not? What have we learned?
Execution: What’s your execution strategy to hit your numbers and quotas?
These meetings and the central questions involved serve several purposes:
First of all, it allows us to highlight our teammates and hold everyone accountable. We celebrate the wins, and we can offer help and understanding when someone is off track.
Second, these meetings create an open dialogue around what’s working and what’s not, along with a culture of testing- so we’re basing our work on data.
Lastly, these meetings allow us to spend time on learning and development that might otherwise be put off or deprioritized.
Having a clear plan that you prepare and share with the team helps keep the emphasis on what your goals are, and how you expect to achieve them.
If you’re a sales executive, I highly recommend you try implementing a weekly meeting like this. If you’re a sales representative, mention this to your manager, or start an informal group with your other sales team members to hold each other accountable and improve.
Inspect and Refresh Your Cadences Regularly
Creativity counts for a lot when engaging and connecting with prospects, but sales team members reps should also have a structure they’re sticking to in an effort to be accountable.
Effective engagement with your prospects relies on your sales teams ability to pick up the phone to a potential customer, accurately identify their pain points and convincingly communicate why your product or service can alleviate those pain points.
Create several different email cadence templates for different goals. You can personalize these cadences for each send, but the fact that they are set up in a template means you can gather valuable data on subject lines, click-through, open rate, etc.
Then you can use your own creativity and proactiveness to optimize the metrics that you’re struggling with.
Part of keeping a cadence relevant and personalized, though, is refreshing it on a quarterly basis.
In doing so, you’re looking back at specific aspects of each individual cadence. Did it achieve its stated goal? This is why it’s so important to have specific intentions behind each cadence, rather than creating hundreds of random ones.
This allows you to look for any weaknesses and correct them or repurpose what’s working really well in another cadence for the next round.
Engage Your Prospects with these 4 Key Areas to Move Deals Forward
Centralize Your Data, Analyse It, and Then Use What Works
Engaging prospects is all about personalisation and timing. Both personalisation and timing rely on having the right data- fast. That means consolidating your data into one place so you can quickly find what you need and act on it.
These days, a simple phone call usually isn’t enough for sales reps to close a new deal. You need to be creative in the manner in which you connect with your prospects. This can be done through a variety of methods such as providing the prospect with personalised videos and connecting with them on social media; anything to ensure that you’re provided the best possible customer experience as well as moving them along the sales process.
Depending on your tech stack, you may already be using AI and predictive analytics solutions. In which case, it’s critical that those solutions speak to and improve your CRM; if you’re not using AI tools, there is no better time to start than now!
Regardless of how you build your tech stack, you need all your tools coordinating and consolidating information, ideally to your CRM.
It’s often a waste of precious time having to go into separate systems to get all the account information you need to move a deal forward. Make sure all your data lives in one place and that the tools that support or enrich it integrate seamlessly.
Your predictive analytics solution should tell you where accounts are in the buying journey, how and when they’ve engaged with your business, which contacts are in the buying centre, what those contacts are interested in, and the next steps you should take.
And this can all happen within your CRM.
Once it’s there, you can use this data to be more personal in your outreach, analyse trends of what’s working and what’s not, and continually optimize your process.
Get Creative and Stay Persistent
The winning combination for engagement is the same across almost every field — detailed account and contact data, a customized cadence, and personalized messaging based on buyer behaviour.
When you’re unsure what to try next or how to improve, the answer is always to look at every aspect of your outbound motions. And ask yourself what needs to be changed, cut, or copied.
Did you dig into your open rates? Click rates? How do they compare to this time last year?
How many meetings do you have booked?
How are the interactions with your cadences and messaging?
The answers to those questions, with the support of your team and intelligent solutions integrated with your CRM, can teach you how to turn obstacles and roadblocks into steppingstones, instead.
The top performers in any sales team will tell you that the relationship that your form with your sales prospects is central to success of any deal. Targeting the decision makers with a prior knowledge of their buyer personas and providing them with the best possible service is a great way to give you the best chance…
You know we are only a click away if you would like to talk more about the above – let’s work together to get you client and prospective clients on board for the successful journey ahead!
Simply email me at nick@nextpractice.education
Keep on Scaling Up!
Go well,
Nick & The Next Practice Team
