5 B2B Sales Prospecting Tips to Start Better Conversations

B2B Prospecting

Many inside sales reps at B2B companies are regularly faced with the daunting task of calling a list of leads that haven’t been touched in a while. Anyone who has worked their way down a calling list is no stranger to the click of a phone hanging up, followed by the “dialtone of death.” But even when leads sound angry or annoyed, it’s important to understand what’s driving that response: fear of the unknown.

From the time that we’re children, we’re all taught to fear strangers. As such, familiarity is one of the most powerful forces in B2B Sales. If you’re calling a new lead, you need to, in a matter of seconds, convey that you aren’t a diabolical stranger in a black trench coat driving around in a van with no windows (or worse: a stereotypical, smarmy salesperson). Instead, you need to quickly get your prospect to see you as a potential partner who wants to provide them with an opportunity. This requires mastering the art of establishing instant familiarity.

Sound challenging? It should. Let’s not mince words – the cold call is one of the most challenging tasks that a sales rep can be faced with. If you say the wrong thing, you’ll find yourself breaking more than the ice.

Here are five tips to help you heat up your cold calls and get to a “yes.”

Research your Prospects

In B2B Sales, knowledge really is power. Even spending a couple of minutes looking up a prospect in Google or LinkedIn can make a huge difference. If you don’t do your research it can not only waste your time, but make you—and your company—seem out of the loop. According to Robert Minskoff who runs a Minskoff Growth Strategies, B2B Lead Generation Company in Atlanta, “People move, companies get bought, and go out of business. There’s nothing worse than calling a company and asking for someone only to find out they are gone, fired or dead. You are automatically relegated to amateur status.” So if you find yourself wondering if you have time to quickly research your prospects, you should instead ask yourself this – can you really afford not to research them?

Announce Your Call in Advance

One way to help establish familiarity is to email your prospect in advance. The email should introduce yourself and your company. It should also provide a link to some helpful content like a blog post or a whitepaper that can bolster your credibility. In the email, you can let a prospect know that you are going to be calling them next week and ask if they have a preferred time. This tactic is powerful because it can help you qualify leads. The leads that really aren’t interested will write you back and tell you. You can then prioritize the leads that want to schedule a time. But even those that don’t respond at all should still be called. And when you do, you can establish quick familiarity by saying that your call is “regarding the email.” This tactic can be used to help get past gatekeepers.

Establish Yourself as the “New Point of Contact”

If a prospect instantly thinks, “this person is calling to sell me something,” you’re likely to meet resistance. Instead, it can help to have a different “reason” for calling. Robert Minskoff suggests calling to establish yourself as a new point of contact. “Something I have used in the past is; ‘we recently had a long time CSR/Salesperson leave and I was going through some of their contacts and your name came up.'”  Whether or not you have done business with your prospect’s company in the past, it establishes a sense of history and helps to immediately build rapport.

Use LinkedIn to Find Mutual Connections

Establishing mutual connections is a great way to establish “social proof.” Just imagine that you’re at a work conference. Who will you be more inclined to trust, someone who just approaches you out of the blue or someone that a colleague personally introduces you to? LinkedIn can be a goldmine of B2B sales data that you can use to establish mutual connections.You can see if a sales prospect is in one of your groups or if you have mutual contacts. You can even use LinkedIn to get “introduced” to prospects by those mutual connections.

Can Asking Questions Help You Engage Leads?

Too many B2B salespeople just try to spew out as much information as possible during cold calls, hoping that something will stick. But sometimes the best way to establish rapport with a lead is to demonstrate interest in them. By and large, people don’t like to leave questions unanswered. That being said, asking the right questions can be an excellent way to turn a sales call into a dialog.

Geoffrey James, author of Business Without Bullsh*t, recommends that after an initial introduction, skipping small talk to instead asking thought-provoking questions. One example: “I noticed from your LinkedIn bio that you used to work in the telecom industry. What was the biggest challenge that you faced, as an executive, moving into a new industry?” Researching prospects can help you identify which questions to ask.

Our inside sales solutions help inside sales reps gain an instant understanding of their leads. Revenue.io can quickly deliver a reps’ social media data from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, sales history, company news and more, before an outbound or inbound call. The result is that reps can slash call prep time.

Sales Prospecting Tactics to Maximize Revenue

When I was an inside sales rep for another company, I almost exclusively sold to leads that came in from marketing efforts. At the time, however, we had outside sales reps who would hop in their cars, drive to viable prospective businesses and try to set up appointments. On good days they might even close a deal on the spot. These outside sales reps were prospectors, mining for valuable new leads that eluded our marketers’ best efforts. Without the often-exhausting efforts of these prospectors, many of our most valuable customers would simply never have heard of us. And since prospectors were specifically targeting larger businesses, many of our biggest sales came from their efforts.

Though sales prospecting has its roots with the traveling salesperson, it has evolved into one of the most important roles in an inside sales team. Now reps in many industries can eliminate the headache of traveling, and have far more quality connections with prospects in a day than they ever could before.

Sales Development Vs. Telemarketing

Prospectors (known as sales development reps or SDRs) should not be confused with telemarketers. The biggest difference is that telemarketing is really a numbers game (e.g. the 2000th person you call just might want to buy a timeshare on Lake Chickamauga). SDRs, on the other hand, laser-target prospects who can actually benefit from your company’s solutions. As a marketer, I have to paint in broad strokes. Even the best marketing campaigns leave some viable leads on the table. A great team of dedicated SDRs can find these leads who would have otherwise never heard of your solutions and transform them into valuable opportunities for your account executives to close.

Our latest eBook shows how to successfully hire and support sales development reps. Here are 4 tactics that sales development reps can use to maximize prospecting ROI.

Use LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a B2B SDR’s best friend. Using LinkedIn can help reps identify new executives (who have mandates to deliver change and budgets to do so). It can also help identify companies that are hiring (as this signals the potential for available budget). LinkedIn’s free service is great. But the platform also offers a variety of premium features that make it easier than ever for reps to pinpoint decision makers at a company.

Use Email to Initiate Contact

One of the most powerful prospecting tactics is sending an email or LinkedIn In Mail prior to calling. This can potentially familiarize prospects with your brand and rep’s name prior to a sales call. Emails are great because it also enables reps to ask to be referred to the proper decision maker. Every company is structured differently. For example, you might think that a VP of Marketing is in charge of buying marketing software, but it could actually be another marketer, CIO or even CEO who handles technology change management. By simply asking, you might be surprised how many prospects are happy to refer you to the right decision maker at the company.

Fast-Track Credibility by Using Referrals

Referrals are the quickest way to warm up a cold call. If you can get an introduction by a mutual connection it can dramatically increase close rates. So prospectors should always search LinkedIn for valuable second-degree connections. But even if reps can quickly establish that they’ve done business with an individual or company that a prospect trusts, that prospect is going to be far more receptive to the pitch.

Use Sales Acceleration Technology

The most powerful way to gain a prospecting advantage is by investing in tools that make it easier to connect with leads.

For example, Revenue.io’s internal research shows that prospects are far more likely to answer phone calls from numbers with local area codes.

Think about it – when you get a call from a toll-free number what’s your first thought? It’s a sales call. But our customers are currently using our local presence tool always automatically to dial leads from numbers with local area codes.

The result is more conversions, more opportunities and—most importantly—revenue.