How to structure and automate your prospecting to increase and predict your sales

Why is your ineffective prospecting strategy costing you millions?

Today's prospecting directly predicts tomorrow's growth. Feeding your sales pipeline must therefore be at the heart of your strategy, because if it stops or falters, the whole company is in trouble.

Yet even today, too many managers do not have a clear prospecting strategy or process to ensure a continuous flow of prospects to convert into new customers, and therefore revenue. Managing and feeding the pipeline is a challenge for 63% of sales managers (source: Vantage Point).

Salespeople are often free to find prospects as they see fit, using the few tools at their disposal (Linkedin, Google, purchased or rented databases, CRM, telephone, email, etc.). The result is that there is no common method, the tools are little or poorly used, the pipeline is under-fed, acquisition costs are high and many opportunities are missed. This can lead to frustration on the part of sales staff, but above all to a lack of visibility on the part of management when it comes to managing sales.

The aim of this article is to help you draw up a plan for defining and implementing a prospecting strategy that maximises the effectiveness and motivation of your sales (and marketing) teams, and enables management to calmly steer the company's growth.

1. Focus on your best prospects

a) Define your priority prospecting targets

20% of your customers generate 80% of your sales

Loi de Pareto

These are generally the customers who derive most value from your solutions and can invest large sums with you. They remain loyal to you for a very long time and recommend you.

To find your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile), :

1. draw up a list of your current customers,
2. sort them in descending order of sales generated,
3. Select the first third of this list,
4. Identify the common denominators of these customers (e.g. number of employees, industry, website traffic, amount of advertising spend, etc.),
5. note the position of the people who were decision-makers or influencers in the purchasing process for each of these companies.

Example of a KPI:

CEO, CMO, VP Sales of software publisher companies with between 50 and 200 employees in France.

Above, the form for creating prospecting targets in the Blacksales application. Blacksales is a turnkey prospecting solution for organising and automating lead generation for sales reps.

b) Formalise your KPIs and share them with your teams

Once you have defined the profile of your ideal customer, don't hesitate to share its characteristics with all your teams, particularly sales, marketing and product teams. This will enable you to confirm your analysis, flesh it out with other information and, above all, focus the efforts of all your teams on the most profitable customers.

Example of targets formalised in the Blacksales application. During onboarding at Blacksales, a specific workshop is dedicated to analysing your KPIs with one of our specialists.

c) Build your prospect lists

You now need to draw up a list of all the prospects that match your KPI, and find their contact details. This phase is very time-consuming, and often requires skills that sales and marketing teams do not have (scrapping, cleaning/unscrambling data, excluding existing hot customers and prospects, etc.).

Blacksales lets you outsource this part by providing you with a customised database that matches your targeting criteria to feed your prospecting campaigns. Your sales teams can then focus on contacting the prospect and closing the deal.

Below, the interface showing the list of prospects based on their responses to Blacksales internal campaigns.

2. Stand out from the crowd when prospecting, don't look like 99% of salespeople

a) Change your mindset (detective vs salesperson)

Most salespeople automatically think of themselves as salespeople, with a highly developed product sales pitch. But this mindset is not the right one to maximise your chances of closing the deal. If you focus on your product, rather than on your prospect's problem and how you can solve it, you risk putting them off and they will stop listening to you.

As a salesperson, you need to position yourself as a guide for your prospect. It's vital that they feel that you want to help them, rather than just sell them a product. So you need to adapt your mindset and approach to the person in front of you and the issues they face.

b) Ask the right questions

During your first contact with your prospect, you need to find the element, the reason why they are considering new solutions for their business. That's real detective work!

Once you've identified that reason, it will be much easier for you to highlight the benefits of your product for their business. Having taken the time to ask the right questions during the discovery phase, you'll be in a better position to propose the best solution to close the sale.

c) Don't go looking for a meeting at all costs

Lastly, don't try to get an appointment at all costs! Concentrate on what you can bring to your prospect, defining together their problem, the solution they want to implement and how to get there. If your prospect feels that you can provide an effective solution to their problem, then you've won.

You're bound to get a first meeting, and they may even suggest it to you!

3. Don't deprive yourself of any channel for contacting your prospects

When it comes to contacting your prospects, the use of multi-channels is essential, but it's also vital to formalise and synchronise your contact processes so that your communication is uniform and places your prospect at the centre of attention.

a) Email

Although email is the easiest tool to use, it is not necessarily the easiest to master, particularly as it is the channel where it is most difficult to get a response. If the targeting has not been done properly, your prospect will not respond to your e-mail.

To get satisfactory results from your email campaign, the message sent must be personalised for each of your targets and must provide a solution to the problems they are experiencing.

Blacksales solves the problem of email content by building cold emailing sequences based on your targets. The sequences are automated and continuously optimised to improve campaign results. No need to spend hours writing, Blacksales takes care of it for you. You receive all the responses directly in your CRM, and your sales reps can concentrate on selling!

Example of a first contact email aimed at the marketing departments of major retailers, customised according to the sector's issues:

b) Linkedin

Linkedin is a highly effective tool for contacting your prospects. The platform enables you to identify prospects who correspond to your priority target, by searching for profiles by sector of activity, company or position. Once again, targeting is essential for obtaining leads via Linkedin!

Next, you'll need to follow up, listen and establish a relationship with your prospect to gain their trust. Once this stage has been successfully completed, talk to them about your offer and how it will address the problem they are currently facing. Generating interest by providing a solution is the key!

Linkedin can also prove very useful as a second point of contact. If your prospect hasn't replied to any of your prospecting emails, it's probably not the right prospecting channel. In these cases, don't get discouraged and contact them on Linkedin, mentioning the emails you sent them. In this way, you can optimise your prospecting strategy by including prospects contacted via other channels.

c) The telephone

The telephone or "cold call" is one of the salesperson's main prospecting tools. This channel will enable you to have direct contact with your prospect, and therefore to forge a much stronger bond than by e-mail.

Once you've got a qualified lead, give them a call! You'll be able to identify their problems more precisely. The telephone is also a very useful way of following up a prospect if they haven't shown any interest from the outset! Once again, the key is to vary the points of contact.

When you're prospecting by telephone, there are a number of factors that will determine your effectiveness

• delivery: control your delivery and be articulate! Your prospect needs to understand what you're saying easily, or they'll lose interest.
• Intonation: be relaxed, natural and adapt your attitude! Be calm with calm callers, firm with tough ones, and in a hurry when your caller is in a hurry too.
• Volume: do your utmost to be audible and hear what your prospect has to say. You can't afford to miss out on important information!
• Emphasis: remembering information is less important over the telephone, so emphasise the points in your speech that your prospect needs to remember first.
• Smile: contrary to what you might think, a smile can be heard on the telephone and helps to establish good contact with your prospect. If you are positive and smile, you have every chance of convincing your prospect!

Blacksales enables you to multiply the number of appointments obtained by your sales staff, so that they can focus on direct contact. As a result, your teams are more stimulated and develop their skills more quickly.

4. Categorise your prospects' responses to prioritise & personalise your follow-ups

a) Prospects interested immediately

Hot" prospects need to be dealt with as quickly as possible by your sales teams to maximise your chances of closing.

The longer you wait, the more the prospect will lose interest in your offer. Don't lose sight of the fact that they are likely to receive many emails like yours (less well-targeted, of course), so contacting them quickly will enable you to maintain their interest in your offer.

b) Prospects interested for later

Lukewarm" prospects are those who have shown an interest in your product, but are not yet convinced. They probably need more information.

You will therefore need to contact them again to clarify your offer and the value it will bring to your prospect before you can close the deal. You can also send them content likely to turn them into "hot" prospects: use cases, customer interviews, webinars, e-books, etc.

c) Prospects with objections

For this last category, you need to concentrate on dealing with objections. Remember, just because a prospect initially refutes your arguments does not mean that they are fundamentally against your offer.

It is your sales rep's ability to handle objections and negotiate that will enable you to convert an initially cold prospect into one who is interested in your product.

With the Blacksales tool, the leads sent to you are categorised directly in your CRM according to their response to your campaign. The tool also sets up follow-up campaigns to track leads that have not converted directly. This means that your sales staff can deal with the various leads more effectively and save a considerable amount of time. In the "Inbox" tab, you'll find all the responses to your campaigns. You can see the status of each prospect as well as details of their contact scenario (campaign, number of emails received, message, qualification).

5. Feed your CRM continuously

a) Opportunity tracking by the sales team

Using a CRM is essential for managing your sales activity. Not only will it enable you to record a great deal of information about your prospects (name, job title, company, contact details, etc.), but above all it will enable you to monitor their status in your pipeline! Thanks to this, your sales teams will be able to prioritise their actions in relation to prospects much more effectively.

Feeding the CRM remains one of the main problems for sales teams, as it will require a significant input of data to be able to provide enough qualified leads, and this process is extremely time-consuming.

b) Lead nurturing by marketing

This process will enable you to gently transform your prospects into customers. The subtlety of this stage lies in pushing the right content at the right time. The use of email sequences is very useful in this situation, because if you plan the emails in advance according to the possible responses from your prospects, then you have the ability to ensure precise nurturing, which is essential in the conversion process.

For example, I know that my 'lukewarm' prospect is a software publisher with 15 employees, so I'm going to email him a case study on the use of my solution in a company with a similar profile. This will give my prospect a concrete idea of the benefits of my solution for their business.

c) Business analyses for management

Continuously updating your CRM will enable you to study changes in your business. You'll be able to contextualise your results thanks to the data collected, and take concrete action to improve your prospecting processes. This quantified monitoring is essential for optimising your various campaigns over time.

Blacksales allows you to integrate with your CRM. As a result, all campaign responses appear directly in your CRM tool; prospects are categorised and your sales reps can follow up the contact by implementing actions based on the prospect's status. For example, if a prospect is

categorised as "lukewarm", the sales rep will know that he will have to nurture him with specific content before he can convert him and get a deal.

6. Define KPIs to monitor your strategy

You can't control what you can't measure.

Peter Drucker

You won't know where to place the cursor on the success of your prospecting campaigns without first defining clear objectives and monitoring.

Here are a few examples of KPIs that you can monitor:

Operational KPIs	Commercial KPIs	Financial KPIs
e-mail open rate response rate positive/negative response rate	Number of appointments obtained Break-even point Number of opportunities Number of new customers signed Conversion rate of sales opportunities Length of sales cycle	Sales achieved Cost per lead ROI Break-even point

The Blacksales platform enables you to track the evolution of the various KPIs of your campaigns. The indicators are updated every 24 hours.

Conclusion

Managing and feeding the pipeline is a major challenge for Sales Directors.

Even today, the main difficulty in the prospecting process remains identifying the right prospects and obtaining their contact details, despite the fact that the world is driven by data: Out-of-date or incomplete databases, difficulty in finding and using this data effectively, etc. As a result, sales staff are wasting time prospecting in particular, and can only devote 36.6% of their time on average to their core business: selling (source: InsideSales).

In recent years, the digitalisation of business processes has been at the heart of many companies' strategies, and we believe that prospecting should be no exception. By enabling you to automatically and continuously enrich your pipeline with highly qualified leads, Blacksales enables your sales teams to focus on the act of selling.

• Identify the most qualified prospects for your business and build up an up-to-date database,
• The right message, at the right time,
• Integration with your CRM and marketing tools (Hubspot, Salesforce etc.),
• Behavioural analysis and categorisation of your prospects' responses to implement the relevant follow-up actions,
• Onboarding, testing and support throughout the use of the solution with a consultant dedicated to optimising your campaigns!

Today, around a hundred companies rely on Blacksales to feed their sales pipeline with quality leads.