by Raghu Nandhan | Jun 3, 2021 | Blog, Company, Sales and Marketing
Sales prospecting is an essential activity that highly influence your sales growth. Building market strategies to develop effective sales prospecting involves Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. While segmentation of target groups provides you a broad overview of the market, targeting narrow down your focus to a specific target group to position your product or services. Targeting is the process that makes your sales prospecting more specific by building a solid ‘Ideal Customer Profile’ or ‘buyer persona’.
Importance of Specificity in Sales Prospecting
Sales prospecting is the most challenging part of the marketing process. The effectivity of sales prospective forms the basis of success or failure of further stages of market process. Specificity in prospecting helps in gaining more successful leads.
For instance, if you are selling a set of knives, you can segment a group based on age, say 18–40 years. But if you are specifying the target group, say, men and women between the age of 18 to 40 years and having cooking as hobby, you are likely to get more effective leads through this sales prospecting group.
Marketing people know that all sales prospect does not convert. But building specific buyer persona while sales prospecting enhances your chance of better conversion rate. It helps you prioritize and determine the effort of pursuing leads that fits in your ideal customer profile. Therefore, specificity in sales prospecting helps you develop an effective sales funnel to maximize leads.
How to build a specific Buyer persona?
Developing a buyer persona is easy but building a specific buyer persona requires research and clear understanding of the product/service you are selling. To simplify the process, you can build a buyer persona by answering these questions.
- What are the characteristics and qualities of the product or service?
- What specific problem will your product/service solve for your buyers?
- Which emotional aspect can your product/service trigger?
- Is your product/service designed for a particular economy group?
Things that affect sale prospecting and buyer persona are follows.
- software or sustainability of the company
- Industry: The ideal customer profile usually overlaps with your competitors in the same industry. Therefore, a thorough study of the industry will help you develop a more specific buyer persona.
- Company size: A SME will have a lower budget assigned for marketing than a large organization. Therefore, it is essential to customize your sales prospecting plan according to the requirement and budget of your company.
- Social media image and engagement: In this digital world, you cannot build effective sales prospecting without the use of social media platforms. Consistent engagement through social media posts or comments can help you to step up your prospecting game.
- Following up: The importance of following up your prospect is immense in marketing. However, there is a thin line between following up and irritating your client. Therefore, one must be aware of the frequency and approach of following up your prospect.
- Cold mailing: Most people use personalized cold mailing to reach out to their prospects. Email marketing is an effective marketing tool that has huge impact even today. Use attractive and catchy copy edits to engage your prospects and thereby leading to conversion.
The Bottom Line
Sales prospecting is a vital function in marketing. You have the capability of generating quality leads if you can build buyer persona or ideal customer profile with specificity. Effective sales prospecting becomes easier if you know where to put in your search efforts. Do visit Pragna Solutions website for more blogs.
by Raghu Nandhan | May 26, 2021 | Blog, Company, Sales and Marketing
Soft skills, such as communication, empathy, critical thinking etc., play a significant role in any professional career, especially when it comes to sales. Even though you may not find these as eligibility criteria in job descriptions, these soft skills serve as an important parameter in recruitment as well as in retaining the job. Emotional Quotient (EQ) or emotional intelligence is one of the most critical elements that can impact your performance and career drastically.
Emotional Quotient refers to the awareness of one’s own and others emotions. Empathy has come to the limelight in this pandemic situation as one of the essential values in professional life. EQ is just the parameter of empathetic behavior. In sales, it is essential to adopt an empathetic approach to understand the buyer and close the deal. Therefore, EQ has been recognized as an essential parameter to judge performance in sales. Fortunately, EQ is one of the rare soft skills that can be developed with the help of guidance. Most sales leaders are instructed to teach their teammates the virtue of Emotional Quotient (EQ) or emotional intelligence in order to drive productivity.
5 Ways Sales Leaders can strengthen Emotional Quotient of their team
Emotional Quotient (EQ) or emotional intelligence has been forecasted as one of the most significant job skills for the near future. It has been observed that higher EQ has proportional relation to high performance. Sales leaders can help their teammates develop EQ to drive performance.
Emotional Awareness of Intelligence
Most employees hardly know the definition of Emotional Quotient. It is important to make the sales reps understand the meaning and importance of emotional intelligence. Sales leaders can organize online training or provide useful links to their teams to acquaint them with the concept of emotional intelligence. Leaders may also purchase some popular books on EQ. Some popular yet pocket-friendly books on EQ are Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ (Daniel Goleman), Emotional Intelligence: Mastery — A Practical Guide To Improving Your EQ (Eric Jordan) and EQ Applied: The Real-World Guide to Emotional Intelligence (Justin Bariso). These books will help your sales team articulate the fundamentals of EQ and how it can affect their performance.
Teach Through Application
Tough challenges can invoke an emotional response. Building scenarios to bring forward emotional response is a great way to develop EQ. These scenarios can be rejection or objections. Sales leaders can demonstrate the importance of EQ and how to apply it to deal with such situations. It is undeniable that the EQ application can help when a client is derailed from the buying journey. Therefore, sales leaders must pinpoint where EQ comes into play in their sales process.
Show your EQ as an example
Sales leaders are great when it comes to leading by example. Leaders should keep practicing what they preach. You cannot teach someone something that you don’t master. Analyze your Emotional Quotient skill set gaps through stress tolerance, reality testing, empathic approach and decision-making. Sales leaders must know their EQ skill gaps and work to improve them. Sales reps learn from how sales leader handle or deal with specific situations.
Assessment of Emotional Quotient through relevant metrics
If you do not measure a skill through appropriate metrics, that skill cannot be analyzed and improved. Build metrics to judge the EQ of your team through actions and outcomes. Quantifying Emotional Quotient based actions will help you in setting the correct metrics. Keeping a scoreboard open to your teammates can help develop EQ, improve sales behavior and enhance buyer experience. Consequently, this will contribute to revenue generation.
Develop a Sales culture that prioritizes EQ
Company culture plays a significant role in driving employee productivity. Similarly, sales culture in a sales team is undeniably important. Prioritizing EQ as an integral part of your sales culture will help your team develop EQ and apply it to enhance their performance.
Final Thoughts
Emotional Intelligence is such a soft skill that can fetch profits more than you can expect. This skill can not only help sales reps to bounce back from setbacks but also help in building strong internal and external connections. Sales leaders can strengthen the Emotional Quotient of their teammates through simple exercises to make them resilient and top performer.
