The secret sauce of business prospecting

Like preparing a delicious meal, business prospecting takes planning, gathering the right ingredients, and knowing how to put them together.

Searching for prospective leads can take time and energy away from your sales team. You can’t scour the internet for every phone number or email address you can find and expect your sales team to be successful. Plus, today’s prospective clients expect a unique, personalized sales experience. Instead, arm your sales team with the tools they need to do what they do best: sell your goods or services.

The smarter your prospecting plan, the better your chances of landing appointments and closing more business.

Prospects vs leads: What’s the difference?

Understanding the difference between prospects and leads can help you optimize your sales process.

Leads are contacts who may be interested in more information about your organization. Prospects are those who you have determined would benefit from your products or services and they may have been in touch with your sales team several times already.

Prospecting involves gathering leads, then identifying the right ones that fit your ideal buyer persona. You can decide if a lead is the right fit for your goods or services by asking them questions to understand their needs.

How can you find business prospects?

Start by understanding the differences between certain kinds of leads. Leads can fall into one of several categories, including:

• Information Qualified Lead (IQL): At the beginning of the sales process, IQLs know very little about you and are usually at the start of their search for a solution to their needs.
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): These prospects are actively engaging with you about their requirements, and you’ve identified that you can provide a solution.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): At the end of the sales funnel, SQLs are ready and able to buy from you.

Primary sources of business leads and prospects include:

• Referrals: Cultivate strong relationships with your existing customers by regularly contacting them and resolving issues quickly and efficiently. Happy customers may lead others to your business.
• Outbound calls: Rethink how the sales team uses cold call scripts. Ensure your strategy is clear, including both average call handling times and close rates.
• Social selling: Every social platform offers opportunities for B2B leads. Investigate how you can use each of them to find business leads.
• Use the ultimate sales prospecting tool: Keep reading to find out how BizLeads pro-vides affordable access to verified business contacts.

How can you be more successful at business prospecting?

Here are six basic ingredients for business prospecting:

1. Introduce you and your company as a leading expert in your field.
2. Acknowledge that you know their time is valuable. You could say, “I’m sure I caught you in the middle of something, so I won’t take up much of your time.”
3. Briefly explain why you’re contacting them. For example: “The purpose of this call/email is to get 15 to 30 minutes to discuss how we can increase productivity by 20%.”
4. Ask about their needs and discuss your solutions to their challenges.
5. Review how you do business and show/tell them how you’ve helped other organizations.
6. Use a call to action. For example: “Would Tuesday at 11 or Wednesday at 1 work best for your schedule?”

The secret sauce to your business prospecting: BizLeads

The final secret ingredient to finding quality business prospects is BizLeads — an innovative new sales prospecting tool launched by American City Business Journals. Here’s how BizLeads can help you find the right decision-makers to contact:

• 14+ filters. From a pool of 80 million business professionals at 30 million organizations, BizLeads expertly narrows the search for you into relevant categories based on industry, job title, company revenue, employee size, location, and more.
• Verified data. With up to 63 million validated emails, get exclusive access to private company data on the people who have purchasing power.
• Easy to use. The simple, web-based platform is clear and easy to navigate. You can view your search results on a map or a list before downloading them.

Are you ready to create a winning business prospecting strategy?

Schedule a 15-minute BizLeads Demo and start discovering your ideal prospects today.