B2B commercial prospecting: to find customers effectively Article summary What is commercial prospecting? (sales, prospects, etc.) Prospecting
Digital prospecting:
how to find new customers on the web?
How to prospect when traditional techniques no longer offer the expected results?
Digital prospecting adapts to new buyer habits. Faced with over-demand from decision-makers, it relies on less intrusive techniques to generate new commercial opportunities. What are the techniques of online prospecting? How to succeed in prospecting on the web?
Article Summary
What is digital prospecting?
Digital prospecting refers to all marketing and commercial actions carried out online by a company to find new customers. Generally speaking, commercial prospecting is a strategy which aims to generate a continuous flow of potential customers (or prospects) in order to fuel commercial dynamics.
With traditional prospecting methods, the company took the initiative of the first contact. Conversely, digital prospecting consists of attracting prospects to the company.
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Why prospect online?
Online prospecting is a strategy that responds to changing behavior of prospects and buyers. While making commercial contact by telephone was the norm, the development of the web has changed the situation.
From now on, buyers are autonomous in their search for information on the internet. The information on the web is so plentiful that they can document their problems on their own. They can even learn about existing solutions and compare them online.
As a result, prospects are no longer dependent on companies for the first steps of the buying journey. We consider that 50 to 60% of the B2B purchasing journey is done digitally and without commercial contact.
Under these conditions, inbound marketing has established itself as the ideal prospecting method for capturing a prospect in the pre-purchase phase on the internet. No more question of imposing an unsolicited and interruptive digital commercial contact on him. The company attracts its prospects by providing them with useful and quality information.
Furthermore, B2B purchasing cycles are longer and more complicated than in the past. In order to optimize expenses, each purchase is weighed, controlled and often involves several decision-makers. As buyers are better informed about the solutions, competition is stronger. As a result, more sales cycles fail to complete. You must therefore improve your lead generation to achieve your commercial objectives.
Finally, in a context of over-solicitation from B2B buyers, the ROI of traditional marketing methods is at half mast. Digital methods are often less expensive for convincing results.
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Methods of prospecting on the web
There are several methods for finding potential customers on the Internet. This is particularly the case for email marketing.
However, mass emailing is losing momentum and is more similar to traditional methods. From now on, the success of emailing campaigns depends on the quality of the contact base and the relevance of the segmentation.
Therefore, emailing is more effective when it is part of an overall inbound marketing strategy.
Prospecting through inbound marketing
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategy which consists of attracting prospects to your website through quality content and then converting them into customers.
Since traditional methods face resistance from buyers, companies must optimize the initiation of the first commercial contact.
If this contact occurs too early in the purchasing journey, the buyer risks considering that we are trying to force their hand. Conversely, if it is too late, the company risks losing opportunities to a competitor.
To trigger the sales contact at the right time, when the prospect is mature, the company must first create a pipeline of sales opportunities.
How to do inbound prospecting?
Firstly, the company seeks to generate qualified web traffic. Once she has identified her target customers and their issues, she implements a content strategy. Content marketing consists of creating and distributing relevant content to attract qualified visitors.
When the company generates qualified traffic thanks to SEO (SEO referring to natural referencing) and social media, the second step consists of maintaining the conversation with some of the visitors. Indeed, most web visitors are not yet mature enough to buy. You need to get them to share their contact information, for example by offering valuable content in exchange for a form.
Now that the link is established, the company seeks to mature its leads. To do this, she interacts with her contacts through personalized email sequences. This lead nurturing phase will make it possible to score prospects according to their behavior and automatically transmit hot prospects to the sales teams.
Social selling
Social selling is an online prospecting process based on the “social media” channel. Moreover, it is mainly on the professional social network LinkedIn that salespeople can prospect effectively.
Social selling consists of detecting new commercial opportunities on LinkedIn, getting in touch with prospects and interacting with them with a view to obtaining a sales meeting.
It can be used in addition to an inbound marketing strategy. Indeed, in B2B, professional social networks are essential for the distribution of inbound content. By sharing quality content, salespeople can expand their subscriber base and therefore potential prospects. Content is also a gateway to creating interactions with previously defined targets.
Digital conversational marketing
In the broad sense, conversational marketing refers to any form of marketing based on conversation with the prospect.
In a stricter sense, it corresponds to all marketing actions based on direct conversation such as chatbots or instant messaging.
This is a trend that businesses can no longer ignore. Indeed, buyers demand immediacy in relationships. In addition, chats are an excellent way to generate leads in an inbound logic.
If a visitor struggles to find the information they want on a site, they will leave without providing contact information. Unless he can easily access a chatbot that will redirect him to the right information while collecting additional data.
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The stages of digital prospecting
Define your targets and prospects
To achieve their objectives, online prospecting actions must rely on an excellent knowledge of your target customers on the internet. Indeed, the actions must be specifically aimed at potential buyers.
It is therefore necessary to determine the profile of your ideal customers.
The buyer personas method makes it possible to define the typical profile of your target customers, the main problems they encounter and their preferred communication channels.
More broadly, defining your personas helps you know precisely the purchasing journey of your prospects. Then, the personas serve as a guide for all marketing and commercial actions.
Setting your digital prospecting objectives
One of the advantages of digital prospecting is that it allows the purchasing journey to be finely divided into several stages. At each stage, you can set intermediate objectives and measure your results.
Upstream, the company will therefore set prospecting objectives directly linked to its business objectives. On the basis of the forecast turnover, we can for example define an objective on the number of new customers.
Then, based on past or sectoral conversion rates, we can unwind the reel and set intermediate objectives over a given period.
Optimize your website for prospecting
Prospecting online requires making your website a digital tool serving the company's commercial dynamics.
From a prospecting perspective, we cannot be satisfied with a showcase site. The website must be designed for the conversion of visitors.
If the purpose is to purchase a product directly online, then the site must facilitate the creation of an online account. If the purchasing cycle is more complex, the site will integrate online forms, for example for downloading premium content.
In all cases, it will be essential to create calls-to-action, landing pages and online forms to achieve your objectives. The ergonomics of the site, the network and the navigation route must also correspond to the purchasing journey (buyer's journey) defined during the personas stage.
Deploy your content strategy
Content marketing responds to two challenges:
- Generate qualified traffic to the company website
- Supply the prospect with content throughout their journey
To generate traffic, we will design a content strategy based on our personas. Indeed, the best way to attract qualified visitors to your site is not to praise the merits of your offer. What interests prospects is finding answers to their problems.
Once these issues have been identified, we will produce content accordingly and optimize it for natural referencing to generate organic traffic. In a dissemination logic, we will also share the content on the favorite social networks of target customers in order to attract them.
But the role of content is not limited to this attraction phase. When the visitor becomes a lead, he or she is rarely mature enough to buy immediately. It is therefore necessary to continue the conversation before initiating a commercial contact. With this in mind, digital content serves to fuel the marketing conversation to be in contact with prospects.
Therefore, simply creating content is not enough to attract visitors. We must produce relevant content for all stages of the customer journey.
Generate leads online
Lead generation requires equipping your site with conversion tools: calls-to-action, landing pages, forms. Above all, it requires compensation to be offered to the visitor in exchange for their contact information.
Very often, we will offer content with high added value (white paper, e-book, practical kit, template, etc.) to capture leads.
Nurture your leads
When you obtain a visitor's contact information, nothing is yet won. It is still necessary to qualify the lead, that is to say assess its level of maturity and collect additional information.
At this stage, we will provide the lead with content corresponding to their profile and behaviors. The goal is to move it forward through the conversion funnel. To do this, we send him personalized email sequences and observe how he reacts.
For each interaction, we will give it a score. This is called lead scoring. For example, +20 for downloading a white paper or –5 for an unopened email.
This score corresponds to the maturity level of the lead. If you use a marketing automation solution, you can score your contacts automatically and trigger the transmission of the lead to salespeople when a given score is reached.
Trigger sales contact
Marketing considers that the prospect is hot for a sales contact. The sales teams take over.
The salesperson will make an initial contact which aims to once again qualify the prospect. We speak of “commercial qualification”.
Traditionally, we use the BANT method to ensure that the prospect has a budget, that he is the decision-maker, that his need is real and that it is already planned over time. If this is the case, then the commercial dynamic is in place. Otherwise, the prospect is either disqualified or put back into a nurturing cycle.
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Online prospecting tools
Digital prospecting presents a major difficulty: knowing when the prospect is hot enough to be called by a salesperson.
Bringing a lead up to maturity takes time and, at the same time, additional information must be collected to qualify it. On a large scale, it is impossible to carry out these tasks manually.
A marketing automation solution allows you to create personalized lead nurturing email sequences. It also allows you to score your leads to prioritize commercial support. Today, this type of solution is a must-have in digital prospecting.
In addition, marketing automation is all the more valuable when the information collected by marketing is automatically transmitted to the salespeople's CRM software. The MagiLeads solution offers perfect synchronization of information for optimal alignment between marketing and sales.
Digital prospecting appears to be the remedy for the decline of traditional techniques. To be effective, it must nevertheless rely on a solid knowledge of the customer purchasing journey and on automation tools serving conversation and conversion.
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