In sales, prospecting is defined as the process of engaging potential customers with the ultimate goal of convincing them to make a purchase. There are different types of prospecting. Among the examples are emails, cold-calls, social media, digital advertising, networking, and trade shows.
Technology has drastically changed the art of selling. In the past, the conventional method is for the salesman to knock on your door. If you had ever tried cold-calling before and experienced the rejection, you can only imagine how they feel when the homeowner slams a door on their face.
The top salespersons are those who have mastered human psychology and the art of reading body language. Fortunately, the process becomes more manageable with the multiple sales prospecting tools in the market today.
The buzzword now is big data or business analytics. Big data is projected to hit 274.3 billion USD by 2022, based on the compound annual growth rate of 13.2%. In 2018, the market value of business analytics was 169 billion USD.
In essence, big data gathers, curates, and analyzes massive data sets that are too complex for your average data processing tools. By extracting insights from the data, the organization can predict customer behavior, which is material to altering marketing strategy for optimum results.
How New Prospecting Tools Can Help Your Business
There are multiple ways sales prospecting tools can help drive up your revenue stream. They are:
- More results for less work – Targeted prospecting means you no longer have to make cold calls, which have very high failure rates. However, when you know who among your customers is likely to make a purchase, engaging with them at the right time and using the correct triggers will boost your chances of concluding the sale. The more information you input into the tool, the more accurate the predictive analysis would be.
- Develop a profile for existing and potential customers – Would you not like it if you have a customer profile on your hands that shows your customers’ online behavior patterns? You would know what websites they visit, how much time they spend per visit, what links they click, what YouTube videos they watch, and what online goods they order. The information you collect is vital to come up with a marketing strategy to sell them your product or service.
- Automate your workflow – The sales prospecting tools will also unload your workers of the administrative tasks. For instance, they do not have to make a report and submit it to their supervisors to gauge performance. They avoid the need to plan and craft presentations from the complex data for the next meeting. By automating the workflow and procedures, the sales agents can focus on enhancing the customer experience.
- Lead generation – Business development representatives no longer have to develop sales leads manually. Prior to the big data software present in the market today, generating leads was a hit-and-miss process. There is no way for companies to come up with a single guidebook that serves as the marketing department’s bible to boost sales. Lead generation is automated using all the available information mined online.
These are some of the benefits of using sales prospecting software in your organization. Although you will incur some costs if you subscribe to the proprietary technology, the tool practically pays for itself. You can see the returns on your investment in a matter of months or even weeks.
