10 Things to Know About Prospecting - Jordan Wolf
1) The prospecting part of sales is still a valued and time-tested way of approaching new customers, a recent survey by the ‘RAIN Group’ reported that 82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers who proactively reach out.
2) 42.1% of respondents say that the phone is the most effective sales tool at their disposal – ‘Sales Insights Lab’
3) With just a little persistency (see our blog Sales Persistency is a Management Issue) sales professionals can increase their conversion rate by 70%. – ‘Call Hippo’
4) 57% of C-level buyers prefer to be contacted by phone. – ‘Crunchbase’
5) It is so important not to hide your number as according to ‘Hiya’ as a staggering 79% of unidentified calls go unanswered.
6) ‘Gong.io are confident to declare that salespeople who state their reason for calling have a 2.1x higher success rate. Nothing like a well-prepared script when going to battle with prospecting. They also reported that cold calls where reps monologue are more successful, another compelling argument for having a documented prospecting process.
7) A recent ‘LinkedIn’ survey unsurprisingly recorded that 63% of sellers say cold calling is the worst part of their job. A good reason for developing an effective way to prospect that lessens the burden of cold calling on your sales team.
8) Name dropping can work as a ‘LinkedIn’ study found that mentioning a common connection during a cold call can increase the likelihood of getting that meeting by 70%.
9) In 2021, ‘Gong.io’ found out that asking “Is now a bad time?” on a cold call makes you 40% less likely to get a meeting. Re-enforcing the fact that effective prospecting scripts are so important for cold calling.
10) Wednesday and Thursday are seemingly the best days of the week to call prospects with between 4PM and 5PM being a good time to get through to them. Personally, I think ‘now’ is always a good time to make prospecting calls.
Prospecting is all about preparation and persistency. Getting organised means a good script with a simple but strong messaging woven through it. Being able and ready to manage objections and even rejection now and then. The essence of it though is consistency, and by this, I mean to do a little but often is the rub.
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