The PROSPECTING rulebook, A 4-WEEK strategy document Hitting your sales quota each quarter is no mean feat. It takes a lot of hard work and talent. But if you’re working flat out and yet consistently finding it hard to make quota, it’s natural to find yourself thinking: “what more can I do?” The answer most likely is: “a lot”! Making sure you hit your sales quota is not as simple as having a great work ethic and attitude. It takes discipline, organisation and strategy. This series will help guide you to hitting sales quota again and again. CPSA Meeting in a Box: A series of 15-minute guided presentations to help increase your team’s performance.

Pre-learning: Facilitator: One week prior to your meeting, please inform your sales team to prepare with these CPSA Learning Hub resources. Reading: Article: 5 Keys to Effective Prospecting White Paper: Six Critical Selling Skills Listening: Social Selling, the Importance of Being Authentic and Ways to Project One's Brand Webinar Recording: Prospective Prospecting - Turning an Interruption into a Conversation

WEEK 1: introduction: What does Prospecting involve? Gathering and synthesizing client and market intelligence, aligning strengths and weaknesses towards creating solutions, and developing, implementing and following an action plan based on strengths, weaknesses, competition and trends. The CPSA defines the process of prospecting as 'gathering and synthesizing client and market intelligence, aligning strengths and weaknesses towards creating solutions, and developing, implementing and following an action plan based on strengths, weaknesses, competition and trends.’ This 4 week series will provide you with the insights, research, tactics, and practical exercises to help you improve how you channel your energy and decision making during the sales prospecting stages. This first presentation will take you through some of the big issues related to prospecting in today’s digital age.

The Changing Role of the Salesperson Prospecting, the task of finding qualified leads for the sales team, requires a huge amount of work. Advances in how we can engage with prospects and how they can access information about brands, has changed the game! The ways we communicate with audiences and prospects has changed dramatically in the last ten years. So what is the secret to successful prospecting today? In reality, not all prospects are going to turn into good leads for the sales team to work with. Of the huge lists of potential customers that are handed over to the sales team, only a small percentage will bear fruit. That means that prospectors need to search far and wide to come up with large quantities of potential leads. The fewer potential leads they come up with, the fewer sales the sales team will be able to generate. In order for the prospecting process to work to the best of its abilities, it has to be as efficient as possible. In this context, efficiency is absolutely vital, as is the task of sourcing out prospects who are more likely to turn into customers.

Sales prospecting strategy Your efforts help fuel the sales funnel! The sales funnel is made up of several key stages and fed by marketing and sales activities. The days when a sales team could work with their marketing departments to build lists, send out mass email campaigns, rely on chance meetings at trade shows or employ cold calling are in the past.  Today’s sales funnel requires a web of interconnected channels, each with their own communication specialisms and audiences. At the top of the modern multi-channel funnel sits not just calls, events and referrals, but also social media, SEO, varied content formats, paid search, and much more. 

Authenticity and Consultative Selling Throughout the sales process, its vital that your company’s brand and those people representing it come across as authoritative, dynamic, reliable and authentic! While, there’s still a place for more traditional forms of sales prospecting like calling and direct mail, more and more industries make the lion’s share of revenues through online channels in some way. So where do we as sales people fit in? It’s our role to harness the power of big data, AI and social media to support and grow our leads funnel. Social selling is huge when it comes to reaching and engaging large scale targets. The wealth of information open to buyers and the online channels of two-way communication available to the buyer and seller means that, more than ever, it is vital to demonstrate authenticity, product expertise and a consultative approach at every stage of the sales funnel. Listen to 'Social Selling and Authenticity': Sales expert and author Larry Levine is quizzed about tactics and tools to help you project an authentic brand through social selling channels.

THE Role of robots in prospecting Artificial Intelligence and Making Time for the Important Stuff AI-fueled sales prospecting technologies are now so advanced, many sales organisations can automate and filter large numbers of early-stage consumer interactions. This means more time for salespeople to focus on landing the most desirable and most likely prospects. AI and chatbots are dramatically changing a business’ capacity to respond to online enquiries quickly and improve the customer experience. Using a messaging platform, similar to what many users are already familiar with through Facebook messenger etc, chatbots engage customers, answer basic questions, qualify leads and escalate them to a human member of the team. The good news for sales reps is that when they receive leads, they can respond quickly in an informed manner. Importantly, they are engaging with the prospect while they are actively seeking help and service, not days later when they are busy with something else.

Take action! ACTIVITY: TEAM MEMBERS SHARE WHAT WORKS BEST FOR THEM: Each member of the team is now invited to share the prospecting tools and techniques they find get the best results. We hoped you enjoyed this introduction to some of the high-level prospecting-related factors to study ahead of getting into tactics and strategy from next week. Time for a team activity! The Presenter will invite each participant to share examples of channels (e.g. phone v LinkedIn inmails) with the rest of the group which they find works best for them in engaging new prospects and starting meaningful dialogues. Team members are encouraged to offer examples of strategies which worked well and anecdotes of when lessons were learned.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES FROM CPSA TEMPLATES – CPSA is constantly building and upgrading our catalog of templates to make your job easier! WEBINARS - Our “virtual” training sessions led by industry experts, at your convenience. PODCASTS - Take the sales experts wherever you go! LEARNING HUB - Check out the latest sales articles, white papers, and ebooks

GO TEAM GO!