Prospecting

Help your customers to uncover a need that your solution might be able to help with.

The first step of the Sales Flywheel is prospecting - contacting potential customers by:

or any other channel you can build a relationship with them on.

As you move from an SDR to AE role you might think that prospecting is no longer your responsibility.

Don’t fall into that trap.

Successful salespeople never give up their focus on consistent prospecting.

You might have the support of marketing, an SDR team, or inbound requests - but you are responsible for prospecting.

“The brutal fact is the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipe, and the root cause of an empty pipe is a failure to prospect.”

— Jeb Blount, Fanatical Prospecting

Before you start prospecting you must define your unique perspective.

What knowledge or insight can you take to your customer that they cannot get anywhere else?

You have a unique position between:

Marketing don’t know that

Your competition doesn’t know that

Your customer doesn’t know that

Questions to ask yourself

Who is your target customer and what is their size, focus or industry?
What problems are your customers trying to solve?
Who in your target customer would be responsible for solving this problem?
What problems are specific to the industry or segment your focus on?
What issues are currently important in the industry or segment you focus on (sustainability, inflation, customer satisfaction…)?
How important is this problem in your customer’s list of priorities? What is more important and why?
What other options does the customer have for solving this problem?

Why is your solution perfect for your target client to solve their problem?
Why is your solution not perfect for your target client to solve their problem?
How do customers find out about solutions to this problem?
What do you know about this problem that your customer doesn’t?
What does your customer know about this problem that you don’t?
What problems does your solution not solve?
What new problems are created by solving this problem (implementation, integration, training)?