A big problem that you already know about

How often do you open your email inbox and find a message like this?

“We have 18 year’s experience in a wide variety of sectors, offering our clients an excellent service in the many services that we offer, blah, blah, blah….”

YAWN! I’m bored already! What’s more, this is totally irrelevant to my life. Rant Time: What’s clearly happened here is that the writer of this email has decided to take a shotgun approach and send the same spammy email to 1000’s of recipients. It’s not only bad for business, it’s kind of insulting that someone would put zero thought into me or my situation before taking up my valuable time with such a poorly written email.

You think it makes you sound experienced when it actually comes across as irrelevant

The above example is actually taken from an email I received.  Emails and sales pitches like this are so common these days. The problem is that the senders usually think that this type of message makes them sound highly experienced but it in fact makes it really hard to see the benefit of using their service. Here are the most common ones;

We work across many industries – “So what? Do you know anything about working in my industry?”

We have XX year’s experience – “Who cares? What I want to know is are you any good at what you do?”

We offer a wide variety of services – “I don’t need a wide variety of services! I have this one specific problem that needs solving, can you help?”

Any of these above examples actually make it harder for a Prospect to see how great you are. When selling, you need to make it as easy as possible for a Prospect to see that you are valuable to them. To help you out with this, I have created a few B2B Prospecting Tips

B2B Prospecting Tip #1: Be Relevant and Concise

How can you be relevant and concise to a Prospect? Do some research. Find out a specific problem that they have and then approach them on that one problem only. A good way to show brevity would be to structure your initial contact in this way;

I noticed that you have [Problem or Pain Point]. We work with [Client which is relevant to them], where we helped solve [Problem] and achieved [X% increase or saved £Y in costs]. Is it worth scheduling some time to talk further about how we might do the same for you?

B2B Prospecting Tip #2: Be Genuinely Valuable to the recipient

Are you actually offering them something that they’d want to say yes to? Maybe offering a quote isn’t going to get them excited, but what about a free trial? What about a demo? What about offering a guarantee?

A big B2B prospecting tip is offering something to the Prospect that’s going to make them sit up and pay attention.

B2B Prospecting Tip #3: Respect their Time

Early on in the sales process, you won’t be able to command a lot of your Prospect’s time. Why? Well, chances are that you have to somehow ‘interrupt’ them to get their attention. Eg placing a call during their working day, them clicking one of your banners whilst browsing, visiting your stand at a trade show, etc.

“The goal at this stage isn’t to sell, it’s to see if it’s worth scheduling some time to further discuss”

 

Basically, you’ve caught them in the middle of something and they’ve agreed to give you a few minutes of their time to see if it’s worth more of their time in the future. Be honest about how much time you’ll need. Respect their time. Be concise, be engaging, be valuable and take it one step at a time!

I hope you found these B2B Prospecting Tips useful. You can find out more about our Results-focused B2B appointment setting campaigns here.