Prospecting is about building trust, confidence, and differentiation in the minds of your potential client; to get them to open-up to you and perhaps agree to transact business with you. Yet often, we get many basics wrong in building a great prospecting experience with our potential customers.
In this post, I wish to delve deeper into the prospecting challenge and how best to create a culture for effective prospecting, focusing on business needs; and how technology can go a long way to empower your organization to get its prospecting function right.
Far too often salespeople rely on large unintelligent lists to “hit” thousands of people with a standard email with a view to generate interest. In fact, quite often I have been at the receiving end of emails from bankers/brokers pitching me asset purchase opportunities in biopharma and recruitment agencies, when I have nothing to do with either.
This type of “carpet-bombing” exercise is indeed old school and delivers little impact and consequently results. When you are dealing with a sophisticated audience that perhaps has a very clear view on their priorities and needs, you must arm yourself with more than a mere list of names with email addresses!
Establish a clear purpose for each prospecting outreach and make sure your engagement never loses sight of that purpose. Remember each prospect is slightly different from the last one, even when you are trying to find the most appropriate buyer (or seller) for an asset.
KYP leads to KYC (Know Your Client). KYP is a critical foundation before you get to a stage you can have them convert from a Prospect to a Client. An efficient pre-prospecting discipline is to know you prospect; to identify the ones that are most likely to “buy” or “transact” business with you.
Curating the right prospecting list, when it comes to targeting folks on an M&A deal, or institutional investors and managers for growing allocations when working in a Asset Manager; becomes critical to make the effort-to-rewards equation work in your favor !
It is important to form a view on a prospect very quickly to keep the process efficient. Having access to data and intelligence around past activities of the prospect, their stated goals and commercial objectives is critical to run a successful prospecting process.
Most often a prospecting outreach fails to generate the best outcome as the process itself is unscientific or just too generic in scope to identify a meaningful partner (or collaborator) on a transaction.
What is essential to drive prospecting success in a way that requires minimum outreach, and the quickest result is to take the learnings from the above points to curate better prospect lists. Such lists should focus on a tighter fit between what you are looking to do on a transaction and how best the prospect may be the right fit for your transaction. You must put yourself in the shoes of the prospect to see how best what you have on offer meets the business objectives of the Prospect. Such an alignment exercise allows for better curation of Prospect Lists and identifying prospects that will deliver you higher success rates on deals and sales opportunities.
We at InsightsCRM have looked at these issues closely to drive greater intelligence in the prospecting process and ensure it delivers increasingly better results over time.
Most salespeople or transaction bankers look at their prospecting lists in a static “deal specific” context and fail to use past engagement intelligence (with a prospect) to ascertain suitability for any future transaction(s). They tend to lose all the intelligence over time on a prospect or are unable to locate them across multiple emails, folders, and notebooks. What is required is an easy way to capture and manage such prospecting intelligence, in a way that allows you to revisit the Prospect and store the growing intelligence on the Prospect over time.
If your business relies on prospecting to generate revenues, you need to ensure your knowledge management capabilities within the firm cater to the following scenarios:
As a banker you can rely entirely on our efforts to place or source a transaction, when it comes to the prospecting function; or you can look to intelligently leverage professional networks in a way that allows you greater leverage in the prospecting process. Remember, each of your competitor firms may be thinking the same and therefore it is important to differentiate yourself and drive a more effective prospecting process that will allow you to execute on a deal with minimal effort.
Sourcing new prospects (from within your network) while leveraging past deal prospects and their intelligence at your end, allows you to achieve greater success.
Everything that we have highlighted above requires “smart tech” to play a vital role to allow you to run a prospecting process efficiently and profitably.
We believe the need for effective Knowledge Management within your business to drive a more effective prospecting process is critical to achieve transaction level success. The intelligence built on a Prospect over time should never be lost to information silos and/or the electronic trash bins (across user desktops) but be readily accessible to drive an engaging conversation at any time in the future. In fact, managing the actual prospecting process with its specific milestones and workflow allows for significant benefits of efficiencies across the transaction team.
We at InsightsCRM we reflect on your customer engagement journey and have designed workflows that best suit your needs in a way that allows you to drive a stronger customer connect and achieve greater commercial success.
