Best practices to boost your B2B prospecting

Building your business through B2B prospecting is a proven, effective way to grow, so why does it sound so hard to do? For most business owners, and particularly those that operate in competitive B2B industries, the idea of reaching out to businesses and actively engaging in sales can seem difficult and draining because of the lack of a clear process behind those motives.

Your process is built out of best practices that you implement within your business for B2B prospecting. Being thoughtful about integrating the right practices is essential to growing in a consistent manner. If you are just getting started with prospecting for your business, or if you haven’t been satisfied with the results that you’ve gotten, then here are a few practices that may help you better focus your efforts and see the results that you expect.

Spend Time to Develop Your Systems Before You Begin Prospecting

An interesting parallel to prospecting is cooking, where you are implementing a process (in that world, it’s generally called a recipe) in order to achieve a specific outcome. The French culinary world has a specific phrase that encompasses the way that they prepare to cook, called mise en place. What this means is that, before they begin cooking, the chef takes the time necessary to make sure that everything they need to prepare the recipe is right in front of them. This time, while seemingly wasteful, is what allows the chef to prepare a recipe properly and efficiently, and what allows them to make it a repeatable process.

You need to do the same thing – take the time to set up your systems ahead of time and have a relatively clear idea of what you are going to do. Taking the time to think through how you will store prospect information and remember to follow up with them will allow you to be more effective later on, and to avoid dropping the ball when you are juggling dozens of potential prospects and trying to keep track of all of them at the same time.

Agile CRM is a great resource for any business in this regard. It can track all of the information that you need to track about a prospect, from milestones and deals to probability ratings, and it can help easily organize your B2B prospecting system into an efficient machine.

Pick the Right Prospects, and Know When to Say No

When a business that is new to B2B prospecting starts to reach out to companies, the initial burst of enthusiasm for the process can cause you to spread yourself too thin, taking on prospects that don’t make sense for your business. There are a lot of ways that you can do this, whether it’s by reaching out to too many different types of businesses, or by not focusing your efforts where they are most effective.

Instead of reaching out to everyone, it can be far more effective to pick a niche that you want to focus on relentlessly at first. This can allow you to focus your prospecting on a key audience and to hone your sales pitch to be most effective with that specific audience of businesses. While that may limit the quantity of prospects that you see at first, it will dramatically improve your close rate, which is the ultimate goal of any prospecting effort.

Prospecting is an important part of any business, because without the right approach to bringing in new clients, it can be difficult for your business to grow effectively. Agile CRM is a key piece of that process—we give you the system that you can use to make prospecting far more efficient, and making follow-up almost automatic. If you are looking to begin prospecting or to improve your results, then using a CRM is an essential step in the process. Learn more about why our CRM is built for prospect by going here.