Don’t Be Precious About Your Sales Prospecting
Imagine going to market with zero fear about how customers perceive your brand or product—a zero care attitude.
What I found, in general, myself included that as entrepreneurs, we can be very precious about our sales outreach. What I am talking about is the prospecting part of your sales process.
Now, if you haven't gone out to make sales before, it can be a very uncomfortable exercise for a lot of people.
If we think back to our tribal days for a second, we are naturally hardwired to seek out acceptance by other people. Our survival depended on being accepted by a larger group, and the safety of that group.
In sales, you're putting yourself and your brand out there for rejection; it goes against what we are hardwired to do.
What I've learned in helping other people develop their sales process, is that the fear of rejection can hinder us from achieving our goals. It's a bottleneck to our success because being precious about being rejected and not having our brand out there comes at a considerable cost. And that cost is not being able to get your word out for your product or service.
There are a couple of ways in which you can overcome this inertia. Each one has its pros and cons.
Generate inbound leads with paid advertising
There are a few different ways in which you can generate inbound leads. You could run some paid ads, such as social media advertising on Facebook or Linkedin. You could hone in on Google search, write SEO content that captures an audience and brings back leads to your website.
The tricky part is figuring out what to say to people, turn them into warm prospects and entice them to book a demo call with you or even better, self-checkout.
Most entrepreneurs want to start at this place. Problem is the takes time to develop an inbound funnel because it requires a lot of exploring and testing to figure out what exactly works to bring in more leads.
It gets a lot more tricky when you have a Software as a service (SaaS) product, and you sell to other businesses because chances are you have a complex product.
With complex products, it can quickly become hard to advertise them, and generate inbound leads, especially if you have created a new product category (think new innovative product category with lesser competitors).
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Start a digital outreach campaign with social selling tools.
There are several tools out there that take the prospecting out of your hands. Think the old cold emails from a decade ago but much better.
Cold emails used to work magic when it came to prospecting. Today it is much more useful to approach people where they spend a lot of time anyway, the social network world.
With the right tools and strategy, you can target your ideal customer segments in a much more scalable and cost-effective way.
It allows you to directly connect with the economic buyer in your target industry and engage on a social level. Once you connect, you can take your prospect down a series of steps to help you qualify whether your product can help and get them on a call with you.
One of the most challenging parts is finding new leads, whether that is due to scalability issues, time constraints or comfort levels. Both of the above approaches let you gain some scale in your method.
Over the past decade in the tech sector, I've learned that the fastest way to scale your business is by first doing it yourself. Not through advertising, not through Facebook ads or outsourcing it, but through hand to hand combat. Going out and talking to people and learning to overcome rejection.
What this allows you to do is get insight from customers that you can't get from an ad.
Your first one hundred customers will fuel the strategy for your product and fuel the design for your business model.
It's invaluable.
Nobody wants to be rejected. That is our natural go-to.
But if you can overcome the inertia with some slight automation to boost your prospecting, then you can very quickly get your word out, book more meetings and grow your company with an excellent conversion rate.
Happy prospecting,
Flavio Hangarter
PS: Whenever you’re ready, I help clever founders to set up their sales and marketing systems, generate leads and close more sales.
There are numbers of ways I might be of help to you:
Create a product that stands out.
Get guided through the market validation process to help you figure out your market, your product and your business model.
Sales Strategy and Systems.
Crystalise your sales systems to attract more customers and grow your revenue with stand-out marketing.
Let's work privately.
Let’s work together and help you stand out.
