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 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 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 effective sales funnel to maximize leads.
How to build specific Buyer persona?
Developing a buyer persona is easy but building 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 to 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 sales prospecting and buyer persona are follows.
- software or sustainability of the company
- Industry: The ideal customer profile usually overlaps with you competitors in the same industry. Therefore, a thorough study of the industry will help you develop 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 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 copyedits 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 Technologies website for more blogs.