Tick, tock. It’s the countdown for the New Year. And the countdown that starts every day of the week and the month for sales professionals. It’s the one part of sales that never improves: the stress of making sure you hit quota.
There has been instability this year that is still lurking in 2023. The organizations that are holding a strong position and the ones that are making up ground must both prepare to adapt their strategy in 2023.
Although we can’t forecast the future, we can use what we’ve learned to guide our plans and increase the opportunity for successful prospecting in the coming year. No more missing quota.
Build a culture of real-time response to follow through on prospects
According to the Harvard Business Review, companies who approach prospective clients within an hour of obtaining a form fill are nearly seven times more likely to apply for the lead than those who try one hour later—and more than 60 times more likely than those that wait 24 hours or longer.
B2B customers are consumers in their personal lives, and consumers are seeking immediacy. We’re used to immediate answers from chatbots and major company support teams—we’re expecting fast replies, next-day delivery, and real-time alerts. Your follow-up approach to opportunities has to fix this, and a corporate-wide culture of immediacy is the best path forward.
Sales reps need to accept agility
Digital revolution is not a novel concept—before the pandemic, consumers were already used to digital experiences, online sales, and even big-name retailers like Amazon for their B2B purchases.
According to Forrester, B2B e-commerce sales are projected to account for up to 17% of all B2B revenues by 2023. This makes selling a bit more complicated. Your company needs to be flexible in its strategy. Ensure that the sales team is ready to sell to remote customers; find new, specific points of sale to satisfy the demands of a changing market; allow on-site transactions where possible, and promote digital and social media to attract millennials and digital-first audience of B2B buyers.
Data-driven decisions for sales leaders
According to the Salesforce “State of Sales” survey, two-thirds of sales teams prefer leads based on data analysis rather than gut instinct. This is critical—to turn the majority of consumers and offer a superior experience, data needs to play a large role in the business decisions. Your prospects will be able to access all the details they need in seconds, so they’ll spot a cookie-cutter email a mile away.
In 2023, customization and relevance are key—whether to achieve a deeper understanding of your potential customers, personalize your follow-ups with enhanced data, or use behavioral analytics to find the most dedicated leads.
Focus on Website intelligence and automation
EY recently announced that 41% of businesses are invested in automation acceleration to prepare for the post-crisis business climate. Automating or optimizing the prospecting process with a strong SaaS is a sure-fire way to develop your pipeline—and investing in your company website might be the perfect way to do that. Reverse IP monitoring software exposes the identity of your website users and monitors their on-site actions, supplying you with a bounty of new leads to the top of your pipeline along with a vast volume of info, all in real-time.
Most organizations rely on Google Analytics, which reveals how many users have viewed a website and other simple demographic data. But they’re raw traffic numbers, and they always have information that shows up as unknown. Google doesn’t inform you whether users are spam or whether they’re from future clients who need a lift to buy.
VisitorIntel helps sales and marketing teams to recognize and reach decision-makers and key influencers in companies who have previously visited their website.
Test and Learn
No one knows for sure what the right outreach approach is going to be in 2023. Conditions remain fluid and will be so for some time to come. Like both sales personnel and advertisers aspire to recognize the changing industry and customer behavior, agencies must also do so in their business planning strategy.
Testing and learning techniques are important when you roll out the prospecting. Pay attention to the various desires of both the overall industry and the role trends. Personalize the outreach so that it is ‘mindset’ important to what you provide and how you can support it. Don’t be afraid to pivot if you’re not connecting.
LinkedIn: An Obvious Fix to Reach the Right Prospects
SDRs invest most of their time exploring—not selling. According to 99Firms, at least 50 percent of the opportunities chased by salespeople are not a good match. Therefore, deliberately choosing which opportunities to focus your time on would inevitably allow more space for learning how to maximize revenue via Linkedin.
Many SDRs have “completion is better than quality” thinking about prospecting. Meaning they go to work, look at the sales quotas of the day, and figure out how many contacts and presentations they need to give to hit their goals.
But, you need to find prospects that have the potential to become buyers for success long-term. Here’s a step-by-step method for using LinkedIn to find ideal prospects and hit your quota.
1. Use advanced search filters
The advanced search filters of LinkedIn help you find leads that fit your perfect consumer profile (ICP) and buyer persona (BP) as best as possible.
There are currently 44 filters in LinkedIn search; in addition to the normal filters such as business size and sales, there are hyper-specific filters such as:
- Leads that you have already contacted
- The leaders reported in the news
- Active Leads
- Latest changes in executive leadership
These filters help you find your target client and allow you to schedule who needs to be nurtured first based on your account behavior or recent changes in their business.
2. Save your lead searches
If you want to make smart use of Linkedin for sales prospecting, don’t fill filters manually every time as you are likely to miss out on a few and get inaccurate search results. After working around with advanced search filters and finding a search that gives qualified leads, you can save it for the future. Name it like “C-level executives in Delaware” and coordinate it by your Ideal Customer Profile and Buyer Persona.
3. Use RevDriver to Access Data
The RevDriver Chrome extension is useful for easily identifying the email address and other contact information, so you can reach out without relying on a LinkedIn connection. Also, along with your prospective email addresses, you will have access to direct work mobile dial numbers, technographic and firmographic data, buyer intent data, and more.
The newest version of RevDriver provides a credit counter to help users monitor their number of findings and improved premium functionality for paying users, such as asking for research-on-demand study. SalesIntel offers 10 credits per month for free users with the ability to add more based on your needs.
4. Save contacts to your CRM
When learning how to use LinkedIn for sales prospecting, you would be surprised to find out that you can’t export your contacts to a CSV or XLS sheet. It hurts your lead management to not be able to pass your leads to your CRM without manual data entry. You can’t keep track of the precise moment or the source from which your leads reached your enclosure and feed them at the right time.
There are a lot of tools out there to export leads. But, the paid version of RevDriver not only gives you personal details and firmographics but also helps you build a prospect list and save leads directly to your CRM—without having to make a separate Excel spreadsheet.
Time to start planning!
Continuous sales prospecting is important to any B2B company. You can’t expand if you don’t have leads flowing in. There is no better time than now to reconsider and reset your business development strategy.
Luckily, these approaches and tactics will allow you and your team to generate and approach qualified prospects to maximize conversion opportunities.
