Top 5 B2B Prospecting Strategies

Do you ever find yourself struggling to find the right leads for your pipeline and want to generate more potential clients and revenue?

Without an effective B2B prospecting strategy, it might be difficult for your business to grow.

Prospecting is a key element to the success of any B2B company and, if you don’t prospect correctly, then the rest of the sales cycle will likely fail. Effective B2B prospecting ensures your business finds leads that fit your target customer profile and, in the same vein eliminate prospects that are unlikely to benefit from the products and services your business offer. This way you will generate higher quality leads that can result in higher sales conversion rates. This article explores five popular B2B prospecting strategies that are proven to be effective and how you can prospect and close more deals with the Red Flag Alert Prospector tool.

How to Create Your Ideal Customer Profile

Before you even start to prospect, you need to build your ICP. Customer profiling provides you with a valuable understanding of who your clients are, how they buy, and where the pain points are in your customer relationship model. Without defining this, it will be more difficult to prospect effectively as you won’t know who to focus your efforts on. There are a few ways to build customer profiles. The ideal customer profile weighs up the characteristics of a potential client with the products or services your company offers. The key is to consider whether your business is a good match for their needs and whether you should target them as a sales lead.

Effective B2B Prospecting Methods

Email Prospecting

Email prospecting is a convenient communication method and, has become one of the most regular tactics used by sales teams all over the world. The power of reaching an engaged audience, that fits your ideal customer profile can lead to more meaningful sales conversations and customers. The benefit of using emails for B2B selling is you have the opportunity to contact multiple decision makers from a single business, which is the key difference between B2B and B2C selling. Personalising your messages to different decision makers and their needs is key to success to increase the chances of your email being opened and, to show you as the sender are being helpful rather than ‘salesy. Having accurate contact details is also crucial to the success of email prospecting, as it’s pointless contacting someone who has left a business or having contacted a non-active email address.  Red Flag Alert’s B2B Prospector Tool uses live data with named contacts and their respective details, to supercharge your sales and marketing. Modern sales professionals rely on email prospecting to convert prospects into long-term customers. The key is having the right strategies in place to turn email prospecting into an effective sales method.

The Power of Social Selling

Since the introduction of social media, social selling has become one of the most prominent and creative ways to attract potential customers. Social selling is the practice of using a brand’s social media channels to target and connect with prospects, and build relationships between said brand and their audience, whilst engaging with potential leads that could lead to customers. LinkedIn as a platform has made B2B sales much easier by giving you the capacity to contact major decision-makers directly. This allows marketing teams to develop highly targeted and personalised messages to engage with prospects, directly.  Social Selling can be considered as the modern-day relationship builder but it’s not as simple as just adding new contacts to your list. It is about making interactions with prospects and presenting your brand as a solution to their problem. This is a means of building trust, loyalty and a credible brand in your field of expertise.

 Cold Calling  

Cold Calling is a marketing and sales technique that involves making outbound telephone calls to qualified prospects that are unlikely to know much about the company before their initial contact. If used correctly, this can be one of the most successful B2B prospecting methods due to the fact it allows you to have a one-on-one conversation with a potential client, making it feel that much more personal. It is up to the member of the sales team to propose their business and the value in what they offer. This can help businesses maximise their reach and should be targeted to a group that fit their ideal customer profile. Unlike more indirect forms of marketing, cold calling provides the opportunity for real-time, two-way communication between your business and prospective client. Callers can also evaluate the quality of the lead, to better understand whether they are a good fit. The benefit is that it is a cost-effective marketing method for start-ups and smaller businesses.

The Inbound Methodology

The concept of inbound marketing wasn't born until 2005 when the HubSpot founders coined the name. It began to show up in tiny blips and bleeps on the Internet in 2007 but it wasn't until 2012 that it started to grow. A long, slow road to success started and eventually turned into what the world knows as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Inbound Marketing, which has become an extremely popular approach for modern-day marketing teams.

The success of inbound marketing lies in ensuring the customers’ interests are always front of mind. By doing this, you can create tailored, personalised experiences and relevant, valuable content that meets their needs. This includes blog posts, social media, eBooks, guides, emails, whitepapers, checklists and reports. This method and its content are developed to answer questions, pain points and challenges that your personas may be facing. Inbound marketing aims to take your customers on a buying journey from attracting them, engaging with them to delighting them so they become customers and promoters.  Different content will be used at different stages of the buying journey.

Account-based Marketing

Account-based Marketing is a strategy that concentrates on targeting a set of accounts within a certain market, this may be companies that are a certain size or are from a particular sector. The campaigns are personalised and designed to engage with each account. This takes a more holistic view of marketing, past lead generation. Marketing to existing customer accounts to encourage upselling and cross-selling ensures your business gets the most value from larger accounts. Account-based marketing allows you to filter out the companies that may be deemed less valuable so your marketing and sales teams can focus on companies that will generate revenue.  Account-based marketing will work for any organisation if Sales and Marketing are cohesive.

 The Red Flag Alert B2B Prospector Tool

The Red Flag Alert Prospector tool has an enormous offering in terms of filters as a part of our FIND function. The main capability of our b2b prospector tool is the ability to conduct an advanced search on all UK businesses. This allows your business to target customers that fit your ideal customer profile. Using the prospector tool will give you access to the contact details of big decision-makers in your ideal profiles.

This includes contact details such as email addresses where applicable and even LinkedIn links so you can grow your network. We list registered and trading addresses to pinpoint your searches. With over 140 filters to use, you can refine your searches to find the right companies or people.

Red Flag Alert uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to continuously evolve, update and improve our data. One of the biggest issues businesses faces is trying to search using data points that don’t exist. We have developed an estimator for turnover and the number of employees. This has proven to increase the number of companies in any given search. An example is a simple search on all businesses with a turnover of between £2,000,000 and £5,000,000.

Excluding our estimated turnover, 19,942 businesses in the UK are found. Whereas using the estimated turnover filter and doing the same search will bring up 132,907 companies. This gives you over 6 times more than a standard search. Furthermore, the development of the Growth Score allows you to effortlessly identify companies that are about to experience growth and will grow at a rate of +20% over the next 3-4 years. This criterion is invaluable for sales and marketing teams for account-based marketing campaigns or, venture capitalists who need to find attractive companies to invest in.

To see how you can benefit from Red Flag Alert’s FIND capabilities, get a demo today.

Download our complete guide to B2B prospecting to maximise revenue here