Make sales prospecting a daily habit, even when you don’t need new prospects to find them. Fortunately, today, with the help of technology, you can automate much of your sales prospecting process.
As organizations change, a company that is not a good fit today can become a strong potential customer once circumstances change. Sales intelligence tools make it possible to track these events, so-called buying signals. More on this later in this post.
Inbound marketing, based on the acquisition of potential clients thanks to content marketing and SEO
Offline sources, such as networking and referrals, are based on relationships
Social selling, based on activity on social networks
Outbound sales prospecting, based on identifying and approaching prospects.
There are drawbacks to each of these methods. Inbound is a long-term, resource-hungry panama consumer email list strategy that relies heavily on the marketing team. Referrals may not be enough, and networking is often a long shot. Outbound prospecting, however, puts salespeople in control, turning them into explorers, searching for gold in the river.
Traditionally, almost every organization relied on the sales department and its prospecting efforts to drive business for the company.
As customers became more selective and knowledgeable, inbound became stronger and companies saw this strategy as a solution to their prospecting problems.
Marketing departments aimed to attract as many potential customers as possible to the website, and then pass the best ones on to the sales department.
This created a new set of problems as many businesses struggled to find quality leads.
It’s the age-old debate between lead generation and sales prospecting. Both processes share the same goal – converting potential buyers into revenue-generating customers – but they use different methods and skills.