Convert more leads with sales prospecting tools

Sales Prospecting Tools

In this article, we’ll be going over the best prospecting software tools for you to use in the workplace. We’ll start out broad and go over b2b sales, and the value of prospecting, and then move into more specific details of b2b sales like sales prospecting tools to use to increase efficiency and effectiveness. When going over what b2b sales are, we’ll cover a sales prospecting definition for you to reference as well as different types of sales prospecting methods that you can implement into your selling strategies. Sales prospecting software is a necessary tool to have in any workplace toolbox and finding the right fit can be a tricky feat. Lucky for you, we’ve outlined the best types of prospecting tools to use, tips and tricks, and more! Keep reading to learn more about b2b sales tools, sales prospecting, and sales prospecting software.

What are B2B sales?

B2b sales stands for business to business selling and refer to the act of a business or company selling software or a product to another business or company. Most people are mainly familiar with b2c selling which is when a business or a company sells software or a service to a consumer. In a b2b sales funnel, fellow businesses are seen as prospects for sales team members to sell their products to. There are many ways businesses come up with b2b sales leads. Companies can use prospecting software or find the right market/sect of businesses that utilize their product best.

The b2b sales process or b2b sales cycle is essentially the same as any other sales cycle. In these cycles, a business will usually seek out prospects, connect with them, qualify their leads, present their sales pitch to them, answer any questions that their prospect might have, close their deal, and then continue to nurture their new clients. Though an important thing to note about b2b sales is that these sales cycles tend to take a little longer to close. One of the few things that might differ when observing this type of selling is the b2b sales strategy. B2b salespeople focus on inbound lead qualification, outbound prospecting and marketing, and more to find prospects. Another important aspect of b2b selling is proving demos to prospective clients. These demos can answer any pain points or questions the clients have and can even give a constructive and realistic demonstration of the product that you’re selling.

What is prospecting in sales?

Before we can delve any further into sales prospecting tools, it’s important to define what prospecting actually is. Prospecting is the process of sales representatives communicating with outbound leads either through email, calls, or other methods in hopes of creating qualified leads or business prospects and clients for account executives. It’s important that sales reps reach out to qualified prospects to ensure that the people you’re communicating with are dependable leads that are actually interested in your product or service that you’re selling.

B2b prospecting is crucial to the success of your business or company. Sales representatives spend a significant amount of time generating new leads and prospecting because it can help grow your business, market to new industries and different types of markets, and grow your overall reach. Because selling is one of the ways to grow your brand’s revenue, expanding your client base is necessary to continue your momentum.

In the sales prospecting process, there are a few different methods that you can utilize for your sales pipeline. We’ve listed a couple of popular methods below:

1. Email

Emailing is a very popular method of prospecting. You can either send emails to large groups of people or single out individual prospective clients. Email can be a very effective method of reaching out if done correctly. If done incorrectly, your emails can get lost in someone’s cluttered inbox.

2. Calling

This is the method you’re probably most familiar with, cold calling is another very popular among both large and small businesses, though this method may not be the most effective, especially if you aren’t targeting qualified leads.

3. Video

Utilizing video in any of your sales prospecting strategies is a great way to grab the attention of anyone that you’re communicating with. Video can help put a face to a name and humanize the entire prospecting process.

4. Online prospecting tools and software

The best online prospecting tools and software usually utilize all of the above methods in one easy way. For example, they can help you send video emails where you’re reaching out using a traditional prospecting communication method but with an additional aspect that can help you step up your prospecting game.

The Origin of Sales Prospecting

Sales prospecting is a common step in any sales process. But what is prospecting? To best define prospecting, we describe it as the process of sales representatives calling or sending outbound email leads in hopes of finding potential clients and customers for your company. Sales prospecting first began with the YellowPages in the late 1800s, and by the late 1990s, sales prospecting started to take shape with the World Wide Web. In today’s day and age, sales prospecting has changed its form and is considered one of the best sales tools to use on other various web platforms like social media sites and business networking sites like LinkedIn.

Sales prospecting benefits sales professionals in a number of ways. First and foremost, when done correctly, prospecting opens up a larger pool of potential buyers of your product or service. It can help you reach new customers and even new fields. With sales prospecting, you can diversify your outreach. When looking for ways for how to prospect for sales in the modern world, you’ll stumble upon new types of strategies that include social media platforms and personalized outreach strategies like video email. Nowadays, those who work in sales also understand the importance of sales engagement platforms. Sales engagement platforms can help you streamline your sales process by integrating and automating many of your sales strategies. A common issue that sales professionals face is actually qualifying a sales prospect and accurately identifying a potential sales opportunity. Sales engagement platforms can help you track your leads to better understand who you’re selling to and how you’re doing it!

How To Identify Sales Prospects

Before you start prospecting, you have to identify the right people to prospect to. To identify the right prospects, your sales and marketing should develop and put together a strategy to figure out who your target customer is and how you can start selling to them. If you’re targeting the right people, then your outreach is going to be significantly more effective. It’s important to target people who your business can actually help. Whether you’re working on lead prospecting, client prospecting, business prospecting, or customer prospecting, identifying the right people is the first step to a successful prospecting strategy!

Below, we’ve listed a few different ways to actually identify the right sales prospects and how you can go about communicating them. Building out an ideal prospect list is the first step in turning prospects into real customers!

• Identify your target customer – Whether you need to prospect auto sales businesses or target education industries, identifying your brand’s ideal target audience needs to be the very first step in any prospecting strategy. If you’re looking at b2b prospecting, you can start by identifying how large you want the companies to be that you’re marketing to, what industries they work in, and more!
• Referrals – Referrals are another great prospecting method or tool that you can implement into your strategy. You can ask current customers (as long as you have a solid relationship with them) for referrals!
• Send personalized emails – Sending personalized emails can help you humanize the prospecting process and engage prospects! If you catch the attention of a potential client, they’re more likely to listen to your pitch and consider buying your product.
• Build up your brand’s social media – Working your company’s social media presence is another great way to target and identify sales prospects. This way, clients can come to you, especially if they’re seeking out a specific type of product or service.

How To Prospect

Some of the most common sales prospecting techniques and methods, as mentioned above, include calls, emails, and video. There are many different types of prospecting platforms and sales prospecting tools that can help you put together call lists, email lists, and more to communicate with and to sell to. If your team wants to use cold calling as a method to prospect, it’s important to stay on top of your call lists. You want to make sure to actually put together an informative and interesting pitch when speaking to a prospect on the phone, you don’t want them to get bored and hang up! If you’re going to focus on using video for prospecting, consider using a video sales tool to help you combine emailing and video together! This way, you can kill two birds with one stone! Videos can engage potential clients and can actually encourage them to respond to your emails and communicate with your brand.

The Value of Sales Prospecting Tools

Technology makes our lives easier and using a prospecting tool will make the process even more efficient and effective. There are so many different types of prospecting tools out there depending on what your goals are – you may be looking for the best email prospecting tools, the best sales prospecting tools, or outreach tracking platforms, as well as other types of tools to help your brand with prospecting. There are options available for everything, therefore, it’s important to narrow in on what your needs are and where technology can help.

The right sales prospecting platform will make prospecting easier, not harder. There are even options depending on whether you want to use free sales prospecting software or if your brand is able to subscribe to a platform, or if you want to use online prospecting tools or software that you can download. Next, we’ll dive into various types of platforms and how to the best fit for your needs.

Sales Enablement Tools

Imagine that there are two sales representatives, one with an array of resources while the other one doesn’t have any. It’s probably safe to assume that the sales rep with the resources will outperform their coworker because sales enablement tools can better support them. The resources not only allow the sales professional to complete their tasks, but they were also able to complete them more efficiently and effectively than that other sales rep who didn’t have any tools to use. Before telephones existed, sales professionals’ first prospecting tools were newspapers and telegraphs. In 1864, a dentist sent the first spam telegraph which helped promote his business. Although our technology has advanced, the primary purpose of sales software and sales engagement platforms is to help salespeople educate the right people about their products or services.

But how do you ensure your reps have the right resources to boost conversions and work more leads through the buyer’s journey? Having the right sales prospecting tools is crucial in streamlining your sales process and creating more qualified leads. In the next section, we’ll cover the most common types of sales prospecting tools.

Sales Prospecting Tools

Below, we’ll outline the five main sales prospecting methods that you can use to amp up your selling prospecting techniques. You can use these individually or combine them to find the prospecting strategies that work best for you and your sales team.

• Calling a prospect or a decision-maker – When there aren’t any inbound leads, a sales professional has to find prospects by giving people a call. This is when cold calling comes into play. Now that sales professionals have access to the World Wide Web, they don’t have to be unprepared when reaching out to talk to a prospect. Before making a call, a sales rep can get more information about a prospect from their social media profile and website. They can find common connections, like a person, a group, interests, or any other commonality that could break the ice with their prospect.

• Referrals – Referrals as a sales prospecting tool is essentially prospecting through people that you know and are either existing contacts, clients, or business partners.

• Networking – Networking involves interacting with others, whether through social media platforms or in-person, to develop professional or social contacts. A lot of sales professionals will attend networking events or use social media to find and develop new contacts.

• Content marketing – Content marketing introduces and educates people about a sales representative’s services or products. When content marketing, you are more focused on providing valuable information about your product as opposed to selling it.

• Email marketing – Email marketing can help share information about your business through emails and points out how valuable your product or service is. Salespeople send an average of 36.2 emails per day. Since you’re already sending out so many emails, it’s important to update a sales professional’s email outreach with the best b2b sales prospecting software.

If you’re able to personalize your email outreach, you can significantly improve how you communicate and correspond with your sales prospects. Including an outreach, aspect like video to your emails not only personalizes your communication, but it can also make your prospect feel more important and recognized. Video emailing can help you stand out in a cluttered inbox and catch the attention of your prospect.

Best Sales Tools for Modern Professionals

The best way to learn more about outbound prospecting is to actually put yourself into the buyer’s shoes. Buyers today are more informed than ever before, but CEB research shows that they’re deeply uncertain and stressed out. Yes, they have plenty of information at their fingertips, but customers are more overwhelmed and paralyzed by this information than they are empowered. So to better help the buyers, sales professionals need to make the buying process that much easier. A great way to do this is to humanize the sales process. Instead of emailing plain-text messages, sales reps can simply replace the text with a compelling, personalized video message as one of their sales prospecting methods.

Covideo can be used as a B2B prospecting tool and a sales outreach tool. Covideo is a sales tool used to easily record, send and track personalized video messages. Adding video to your outreach and sales prospecting improves response rates, increases sales opportunities, and closes more deals. Covideo even lets you add call-to-action buttons to your videos to help your customers stay more engaged and can also demonstrate the expertise of your sales rep. Using videos in your email outreach can also help you shorten the sales cycle as a sales rep. You can avoid lengthy emails, keep your communication short, sweet, and personal while keeping track of a reasonable timeline with your customer.

Covideo: A Video Prospecting Tool

Video can help customers in the buying process in a big way. According to a survey conducted by Google, 68% of YouTube users watched YouTube to help make a purchase decision. Therefore, it only makes sense to incorporate video prospecting into your sales process. Video will increasingly inform consumer decisions and connect businesses with people on the internet. Covideo is the best sales software that allows professionals to express themselves like they would in person. As a result, sales professionals will stand out in the inbox; they’ll build more trust and are more likely to receive a response from their recipients.

Video prospecting can create a positive impression from the first interaction someone has with your brand. Sales representatives can also put a face to a name and empathize their messages with verbal and nonverbal communication. When you offer solutions to simplify their problems, you’ll demonstrate that you understand their pain points. Covideo as a sales engagement software can help you increase open rates, receive more responses, close more deals, and see growth with personalization. If you’re interested in using an app like Covideo in your sales prospecting strategy, read on to learn more about prospecting tips and some of the best practices when using video in your sales outreach.

Covideo Best Practices in Sales Prospecting

Many of the top prospecting tools recommend personalizing your email outreach. Covideo takes personalization to the next level by creating customer-centered communication. Using Covideo’s software, sales reps should incorporate personalization, record quick, engaging videos, strong call to action, and memorable branded video templates. When prospecting with video, sales professionals should keep their videos around 30 seconds to a minute long. This will keep your viewer engaged. Another great way to engage your prospect to hold up a whiteboard or notepad with the prospect’s name on it in the video when introducing yourself and saying hello.

Throughout your video message, make sure you mention relevant topics or points of interest. Prospect are more likely to engage with your video message if you personalize it to them. A prospecting platform like Covideo also lets you add in CTA buttons to guide the viewer to their next steps or provide additional resources. Lastly, best practices in sales prospecting includes creating a custom video landing page, which will leave a memorable impression on your viewer. Now that you’re aware of how important and the difference that video can make in your prospecting strategies, it’s time to actually put it into action. Covideo does all of the heavy lifting for you and allows you to fully personalize your video outreach.

Send Sales Prospecting Videos Today

Sales prospecting has evolved from telegraphs and newspaper ads to social media platforms like LinkedIn and email video platforms like Covideo. Prospecting, to the modern buyer, requires a different approach than what the traditional sales process allows for. Video email prospecting and email prospecting tools like Covideo allow you to humanize the buying process because salespeople can use nonverbal and verbal communication instead of relying on plain-text messages. The best prospecting tool helps both the customer and the sales professional.

Get started today by creating our own sales prospecting videos with Covideo. Let us show you how to incorporate video emailing into your prospecting strategy. If you want to learn how to amp up your sales techniques, try out Covideo today for free. With Start a free trial, you’ll get instant access to all of our standard features, and you’ll be able to upload, record, send, and track video emails within minutes. Try it out  –  Start a free trial; no credit card required! Covideo is the best way to send videos through email; let us show you how to personalize your approach and close more deals!