Avoid These Mistakes in Your B2B Prospecting Process

Almost every business experiences one of these warm lead conundrums:

1. too many warm leads
2. not enough warm leads

My last newsletter looked at a case study of a company that had too many warm leads and how to approach that to maximize ROI and focus the efforts of limited sales resources. Access that here.

If you experience problem #2, you are likely in a consultative, higher ticket sale with a longer sales cycle.

Prospects aren’t necessarily out looking for these products or services on a regular basis.

It’s likely a once a year or even less frequent than that purchase.

It’s a different problem and different approach rooted in both marketing and sales.

So is it marketing or is it sales?

It’s easy to confuse the two and muddy the waters.

The simple version is you need a proven and repeatable process that does 2 things:

• Takes someone from a name on a page to an educated prospect raising their hand to talk to you.
• Takes that prospect through a conversation that determines if they have a problem you can solve for them and if it makes sense for both parties to continue the conversation.

The first bullet fits more in the marketing zone. We are creating awareness of our company and the problem(s) we solve. But an essential element of this is the initial outreach, attempt at interaction, and how that’s positioned.

A huge mistake I often see is companies that take a very sales oriented approach to step 1 (which, as mentioned before, fits in the marketing realm) and want to go from cold to sold.

Usually I see this in the form of hiring some sort of lead gen or appointment setting company who has been hired to generate appointments so you can “close sales.” They usually get meetings, but there are complaints of the prospects being unqualified and the close ratio low.

Why? Because in a consultative, higher ticket sale, it’s about timing and education. They might be open to a conversation to be educated, but know that less than 5% of the market is ready to buy your product or service at any given time. So the rest, you have no shot of closing immediately - and that’s ok!

Knowing that, you build a system to stay in front of those people until they shift into an active researcher or buyer category.

Yet what do we do? We (or the lead gen company) is focused on finding that 5% - a needle in a hay stack and selling those, which we should do, and the other 95% get tossed aside since they weren’t “ready to buy.”

Even those that do have an appointment with you, but don’t close, I’m guessing those get tossed aside as well.

Both of these are huge mistakes that make the difference between always having cold prospects and low close rates to warm prospects raising their had to talk to you and moving through the sales cycle quickly with high win rates.

How to create this system:

• House prospects in your CRM- own your list
• Develop an education oriented campaign that starts with cold outreach to create awareness.

(Josh Braun’s Badass B2B Growth Guide has great scripts and templates on the outreach for $197…I’m not affiliated or getting anything for telling you this. I’ve used it and there’s pure gold in there…easily worth 20x what you pay for it)

• If no meeting or sale, ask if you should stay in touch (most say yes) and enroll in a long term education based drip marketing series. You are playing the long game here. Don’t expect instant results. Over time, you will stay in front of prospects with your name and the problems you solve. When they experience the problem you solve, or know they need a product or service like yours, you will be top of mind.

Good luck!

I want you to feel confident in your sales systems and processes and your ability to take the business to the next level.

1. If you’d like to receive more tips on the regular, sign up for my weekly email CEO Sales Tip Saturday here.
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