Your marketing brings you many leads, but your conversion rate is still quite low? You have a hard time turning those prospects into customers. And therefore the feeling of letting slip many opportunities.
Your first reflex is often to look for the source of the problem on the side of your sales teams. However, the difficulty in converting your prospects can also result from prospecting errors. And these mistakes hurt your long-term business performance.
In order to avoid this, we share in this article 5 prospecting errors that you must absolutely avoid.
Mistake 1: Not targeting
Mass prospecting, cold calls or sending emails to hundreds of random contacts are all tasks that you can accomplish quickly and without much effort. However, all of them can be much less profitable than doing a targeted prospecting…
Want to close more sales? So avoid blind marketing as much as possible. Before you start, always clearly identify your personas and their needs.
To do this, always carry out a study of your personae. Conduct not only a quantitative study, but also a qualitative study of these. This will allow you to collect as much information as possible about them (age, gender, location, profession, consumption habits, etc.). Subsequently, you will then be able to analyze their opinions and behaviors more easily and especially know precisely their needs.
You will have understood it. Conducting a study of your personas will allow you to have a more accurate idea of your ideal customers. Once this study is done, you will only have to identify your interlocutors.
As a reminder, in the context of BtoB sales, your prospecting targets will have to be identified in relation to their function. It is therefore up to you to choose between contacting marketing managers, technical managers or project managers within a company for example.
To be able to quickly select and contact these different managers, consider using a good database. If yours is not yet strong enough, platforms like Magileads may allow you to use one. In the case of this French customer acquisition and loyalty platform, it will be a database including nearly 20 million named BtoB contacts and updated daily, ideal to facilitate your targeting strategy. In particular, it will give you the opportunity to choose your interlocutors according to several criteria (sector of activity, position, civility, …) and then send them automatic messages on the channels of your choice (e-mail, SMS, VMS, Linkedin, etc.).
Know that by doing a good targeting, you will increase your chances of getting in touch directly with the right interlocutors. This will also give you the opportunity to best adapt your arguments to the needs of your targets. In short, what better to convince them and hope to conclude your sales.
Mistake n° 2: focus your messages on your offer rather than on the needs and problems of your prospects
If in your messages, you have mainly talked about the features or functionality of your products, do not expect too much to be able to close sales. Indeed, with this kind of content, you will not convince anyone.
The fact is that today, what BtoB prospects want is above all to be sure that your products or services will be able to solve their problems. Instead of bragging about the qualities of your products in your messages, make them understand what you can actually do for them and why they should definitely do business with you.
For this, you will obviously have to have identified the needs of your targets. You will achieve this by avoiding making mistake No. 1. Once you have clearly defined the needs of your prospects, you will only have to offer them your best solutions by focusing on the benefits they can concretely bring them.
All in all, focus on the value you will be able to bring to your potential customers. Reassure them and instead of trying to sell them your products at all costs, instead make them feel that if they decide to choose you, they will reap many benefits.
In addition, during your first exchanges, always make sure to establish a real relationship of trust with your prospects. If they ask you questions, answer them, always clearly and precisely. Thus, once convinced and reassured, it is quite naturally that they will buy from you.
Mistake n°3: not personalizing your offers according to your prospects
If you really want to close more sales, avoid sending the same messages to your prospects. Instead, send them personalized and contextualized messages. In this way, you will be able to more easily enter into an interpersonal relationship with them, which will then increase your persuasiveness.
Also, know that personalizing your messages will be the best way to show your interlocutors that you have taken the time to research them. Through these messages, you will also be able to let them know that you have indeed learned about their needs and issues before having decided to offer them your solutions.
When you write your next prospecting emails, remember to add variables such as the name of your contact, his function, or his sector of activity. These will be small details, but they can make a big difference.
Mistake No. 4: Not automating your reminders
Your targets didn’t react to your first message? You will therefore have to revive them to hope to succeed in closing sales. However, as you should already know, making reminders is also a most time-consuming task. Moreover, for them to bear fruit, sending them at the right time remains essential.
Do you want to be able to revive your prospects without rushing them? Do you want to do it before they have opted for your competitors’ offer? Automate the sending of your messages . To do this, make use of automation tools like those offered by the Magileads platform. These will allow you to follow your prospects and know when to follow them up.
Digital tools will also help you carry out various actions to strengthen your relationships with your prospects. Before automatically sending them your reminders, they will offer you for example the opportunity to do « lead nurturing » i.e. send various relevant content (newsletter, white paper …) to your contacts to bring them, slowly, but surely, to maturity.
Mistake No. 5: betting everything on a single prospecting channel
As you know, consumer habits and behaviors are constantly evolving. If you want to be able to sell more, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. By this you mean: don’t bet everything on a single prospecting channel.
Certainly, it could work. However, this would deprive you of any other chances to sell that you might have by exploiting other channels.
Today, think about conducting omnichannel prospecting. In addition to e-mailing and telephone prospecting for example, also use LinkedIn. Currently, this network is indeed considered one of the most effective channels for B2B sales.
Be aware that to achieve precise targeting, conduct omnichannel prospecting or automate the sending of emails and reminders, several marketing automation platforms now exist. This is particularly the case of Magileads: a French omnichannel SAAS platform for customer acquisition and loyalty. On it, different tools have been grouped together to allow companies to better generate the engagement of their prospects, customers or partners through the creation and launch of effective marketing campaigns.
