As a small-business owner, you can’t afford to waste time on anything, let alone sales prospecting—one of the most important activities you engage in. Your ability to attract targeted prospects efficiently is critical to optimizing revenue and profits, and remaining competitive with larger players in the industry.
The following is an overview of some of the most important steps you can take to improve prospecting efficiency for your small business.
Use a Single-Channel Solution for Organizing Prospects
Don’t create silos for your prospecting and marketing activities, as they lead to disjointed and inefficient efforts. Instead, use one solution that allows you to collect, organize, evaluate and target the most relevant prospects for a particular solution.
As you evaluate options, consider your ability to build or acquire thorough prospect profiles that enable effective targeting. The ability to leverage prospect data for effective marketing communication strategies through one efficient tool is the mission. You want to segment your promotional campaigns by pinpointing niche audiences that rely on the most useful, relevant insights when making purchase decisions.
Get Some Help
Trying to do everything on your own is a tiring, frustrating, and unproductive pursuit in most cases. The challenge for a lot of small business owners is that their passion lies in running day-to-day activities that drive the company and not in coming up with strategies to target sales prospects efficiently.
An expert resource or partner is a huge value to that end. As you look at the most cost-effective and efficient resources to pick up some of the slack, prospecting is a great avenue. Ideally, find a partner that offers rich, accurate, and thorough prospect profiles that you can easily source and load into your company’s database.
Use Automation to the Extent Possible
The more you can automate processes for attracting highly-qualified prospects to your business, the more efficient you become. Set up customer surveys, questionnaires and contact list registration forms on your website for easy access. Then, you can earn new prospects without manual communication in the beginning because your prospects take an interest in your content.
Creating automated email campaigns that target new prospects based on personal traits and online behavior is helpful as well. You can use your email marketing software to create campaigns and then use lead scoring to identify the ideal prospects for particular campaign content.
Leverage Social Media
Small businesses generally want to have a social media presence for branding and marketing anyway. Your social media channels are not only a great place to share content, information, and resources, but you can also use them to point followers to contact forms. Your social media accounts are also strong platforms for learning about the types of people that take an interest in your company, content, and solutions.
Conclusion
These are some of the most effective strategies to help your company optimize efficiency in sales prospecting. Put these insights into practice to compete with bigger businesses with resource advantages, and to generate more revenue and profits.
Salesgenie is your ideal small-business sales prospecting partner; start your free trial!
