Sales Prospecting - 101
So if you have ever been tasked with prospecting for sales you probably already know what I'm about to show you as it's an extremely simple concept employed by a large number of small sales organizations.
So first what would the definition of prospecting look like?
Dictionary.com defines Prospect as noun "a potential or likely customer, client, etc."
Well if we look at all of our likely customers or clients as dictionary.com would put it, we are in 2018 more likely to find them in a very common place. We could get into ideas about very niche places to find business, like linkedin, online advertising, print/newspaper, or maybe even word of mouth. However almost all good business in the current market operates online to some degree as it's where most of the listing directories have moved for information.
You could say a business could operate without a website in 2018, but you can't say that they have a far reaching effect if they don't, and because most good business want more, they typically employ an arsenal of online tactics to make sure they can be found when you need their services or products. Because of this, Google's map listing is currently the quickest out of the box and free of charge tool we have.
When you factor in that I'm not the first person to come across this realization, you start to see that there are tons applications and web browser add ons that make this job even easier. I will list a few below and walk you through a daily prospecting session where we will look for new clients for our medical advertising business.
1. Putting together a client category sheet
So before you start flying off the rails looking for business on Google you will first want to understand what type of businesses you are looking for, and have way to store and track information on clients. Typically you're going to want to be able to keep track of these following things, The business name, Business Contact, an email for the company or client, a website, phone number, a log for the result being positive or negative, notes, follow up, and follow up date. You can simply do this in an open excel spreadsheet. I will provide a few screenshots for example.
In order to get the top tab to follow with the spreadsheet as you scroll down you will want to freeze the top row, you can do this by simple clicking on row 1 and going to view in your options, selecting freeze, and then selecting 1 row. The top row will now be permanently at the top of the screen.
This will allow you to track your progress as you work through prospects, this would be considered a tracking form
For the business categories it's really simple, you just need to open a word document or write them down on a piece of paper that you can then reference again later. For example if our medical advertising business wanted to select relevant categories where businesses might be interested in our services we would just need to first think about all the businesses that would benefit from our services. So in this case let's say
2. Using Google Maps to find business
When you use google maps to find businesses you have to have a starting city. Let's say we want to start with Memphis, we will want to simple type "Memphis, TN" into a google search engine.
It will return a map in the right hand corner that looks like this.
Once you have the city pulled up and in view you will want to replace the city name in the upper left hand corners search bar with the business category you're looking for.
Once you do this you will see a list of businesses on the left and pinpoints to their location on the map, so from here you can pick businesses based on geographic relevance, or you can choose to just work down the list on the left. Most companies have their website listed on their google listing, you can click this to be led to their website.
Once you're on their website you can simply look for an email to contact, or you can use tools that will do this work for you. Like hunter.io
Hunter.io will scan the website for any known emails and give them to you straight away reducing the time it takes for you to scan the website. It also pairs those emails with the name of the person and sometimes a phone number and job title. There are other tools that work in the same way, this is just the only I can reference from use.
I hope this helps you to find new clients without the need of expensive lead companies, gives you the tools to quickly implement the system, and the ability to track your progress.
