How many times have your prospecting efforts been met with “No, thanks”, “We’re all set” or “Not interested”? Enough times that the sheer mention of prospecting now fills you with dread? It doesn’t have to be like this. All it takes is some strategic planning to get you prospecting the smart way, so we’ve listed the three essential steps to maximise engagement and minimise rejection.

Define your audience.

Internal. If you’ve got the data, be sure to use it! Your internal data can be thought of as your low hanging fruit, offering you prospects on a plate that are both relevant to your business and at no additional cost. Your CRM or existing customer data should be your first port of call,but also consider pooling data from other internal lists such as contacts from other members of your organisation.

External. Where internal data is limited, external data is there for the taking. Although requiring a bit more effort, doing the research to identify relevant companies and contacts can have immense value. LinkedIn, Hunter, Anymail Finder and FindThatLead are all super tools to leverage when it comes to sourcing contact details.

Decide your communication channel.

If you don’t use the right medium, your prospects will be less receptive to your message, if they even engage at all. In the B2B world, email reigns supreme, with a huge 80% of buyers preferring to receive sales communication via email, compared to 49% preferring a phone call and 36% prefer direct mail.

Did you know that it used to take 3.62 phone calls to reach a prospect? Now, it takes 8. The inbox, however, is where B2B buyers are spending most of their time, so if you actually want to reach them, email is probably the way to go.

However, you choose to contact your prospects, making sure to use a channel that is suited to them should be one of the first things to consider.

Use data to measure success.

The sales acceleration tools of today come fit with smart analytics to help you measure your successes. Assess the quality of the communications you sent out via open rates and CTRs which can then guide your future strategies based on what did and didn’t work.

With UpMail it’s also possible to assign a status to each prospect, highlighting whether they’re interested, undecided or not interested. So not only will you be able to easily identify future prospects to follow up with, but you’ll also have a reference to measure conversion rates against. And that’s not all for data. By tracking responses it’s also possible to measure individual success, team conversion rates and overall success of your campaign!

Measuring success is where many B2B sales teams fall short. But it’s where the greatest insight can be found as to why a campaign was successful or not. So don’t underestimate the power of analytics.

You don’t have to be lucky to be good at prospecting. But you do need to start leveraging sales acceleration technology to maximise your efforts and minimise time-wasting!

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Based in London, UK, UpMail is an email tool for hotel sales people to increase one-to-one email communications productivity and sales conversion rates. UpMail clients include Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, MINOR Hotels, Radisson Hotel Group, Virgin Limited Edition, Iberostar, CitizenM, and many more.To learn more or book a demo let us know your availability.