There are few areas of selling filled with more uncertainty, challenges, and conflicting advice than prospecting.
Success in sales prospecting requires breaking through the noise to capture buyers' attention and influence them to meet with you. Which begs a few questions:
Through our study, Top Performance in Sales Prospecting, the RAIN Group Center for Sales Research has worked to answer these questions and uncovered what works and what doesn’t, based on feedback from sellers and buyers.
This large, global study included 489 sellers who outbound prospect, plus 488 buyers representing $4.2 billion in purchases across 25 industries. We analyzed results across industry, company value-focus, buyer title, company size, prospecting maturity and success, brand cachet, and geography.
Most importantly, we studied the actions of Top Performers—sellers with the best prospecting results.
Our takeaways from this research provide actionable data to help you break through to executives and win more sales. In this article, we provide some of the most interesting findings focused on results of Top Performers, and the four categories Top Performers all had in common.
Before we get into the “how” of becoming a Top Performer in sales prospecting, let’s look at the surprising difference of what Top Performers are able to achieve compared to The Rest.
How do Top Performers achieve such impressive success?
They all have WAVE in common. When a component of WAVE was missing, their likelihood of being a Top Performer dropped significantly. WAVE stands for:
Do you LOVE prospecting? Really love it?
Top Performers do.
They report feeling more energy after prospecting, while The Rest say it’s their least favorite part of sales.
Your mindset drives your behavior, actions (or lack thereof), and interactions. You need to have perseverance and energy to succeed in prospecting. And how you feel about prospecting... that’s up to you. Why dread it? Change your mindset.
View prospecting as a challenge that motivates you to do your best. Then get into it—really get into it—and you might just find yourself in the zone, having successes, and enjoying it.
An attraction campaign is a sequence of customized content and messages sent to buyers over a specific time period for the purpose of generating a meeting with them.
It takes an average of 8 touches to break through and generate a meeting with a buyer. These touches should be delivered across channels through coordinated campaigns.
Note, however, that these are not marketing campaigns. This is what sales people do, themselves, by hand (perhaps with some automation help, but at least significantly customized by the seller for each individual buyer).
Reach your buyers through social media, customized emails, direct mail, and, of course, by phone.
Top Performers provide value in each of their touches. In fact, Top Performers capture buyers' attention with the following customizations:
The value Top Performers provide in the prospecting phase puts them above The Rest.
Once you know what to do, it’s time to do it. Execution is where the rubber meets the road. Nowhere in selling do sellers need more focus, discipline, and execution intensity than they do in prospecting.
You must maximize your time and energy for prospecting success while also using your best prospecting skills to impress buyers. Do this and you will generate more meetings at a more consistent rate.
While prospecting is hard, Top Performers follow the WAVE roadmap to success. If you want to not only generate more meetings, but also win more sales, do what the Top Performers do.