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- In this video, you're gonna get my ultimate sales prospecting guide on how to turn complete strangers into appointments and then close a deal. It's gonna be a six-step methodology you can use no matter what product or service you're selling, no matter what industry you're in. As long as your job is to get a meeting either with someone over the phone or in person, and if you want to use cold email, LinkedIn or cold calling, these strategies will work for you. (upbeat music) What's going on everybody? My name is Patrick Dang. Before we get started with our ultimate sales prospecting guide, make sure to give this video a like, subscribe, and turn on notifications if you wanna see more videos like this. Now, when it comes to my ultimate guide to sales prospecting, right? This is gonna work if your job is to get a meeting with someone either over the phone or in person and get an appointment to see if they might be a good fit for you to sell your product or services, right? So these strategies are gonna work whether you're cold calling, cold emailing, or sending messages on LinkedIn, right? That's when you're doing outbound, meaning you're reaching out to someone who has no idea who you are. So no matter what methodology you use, the strategy is going to be the same. So let's go ahead and dive in. Now, step number one is going to be your sales strategy. So no matter what method you use, you still have to come up with a strategy of, who exactly do you want to reach out to? And this is typically where you develop something called an ideal customer profile. Meaning, who is your ideal customer? What pains do they have? What industry are they in? What's their revenue that you want them to have to make sure that they can actually afford whatever it is that you're selling? So this is the part where you strategize, who exactly do you want to reach out to? And you wanna make it extremely specific, right? Because every campaign that you put out, you wanna be hyperfocused on a specific niche. And then when you wanna do a different campaign, focus on another niche, but you wanna focus on one niche at a time. Meaning, if you want to reach out to real estate companies and you're writing your emails, you wanna make sure you only write these emails to other real estate companies that are very similar to each other, right? You don't wanna do a real estate, finance, and retail, and do all these at the same time because it's hard to manage all these things and each different vertical is going to have different messaging. So when you're thinking about your ideal customer profile, think of one specific use case on how you can help them and focus on that one ideal customer profile at a time. So once you got your sales strategy down on how you bring value to this specific niche, you wanna move into step number two, which is list building, okay? So let's say you have an ideal customer profile of let's say, financial tech companies who have 20 to 50 employees, revenue of at least 1 million to 5 million per year, and they're companies that leverage digital marketing. So, this is very specific for us, very specific niche, right? And so what you wanna do once you identify this ideal customer profile, you wanna find all the companies that fit the bill, whether it's using LinkedIn, using Google or buying lists, you wanna make a big list of all these companies that fit this ideal customer profile. The minimum number of companies you want to reach out to is 20. That's my recommendation. You could do more. The more is better, but you want to do at least 20. The reason why you don't wanna do less than 20 is because you want to have enough companies so that when you send your messages, you know whether it works or not. But if you only have, let's say, five companies, just because they don't respond, doesn't mean the niche doesn't work, maybe you didn't reach out to enough people. So that's why I recommend at least 20. Try to do more if you can find more, but find 20 companies and find the stakeholders, meaning, the decision makers at these companies, and just make a big list of all of these people. Now, in the next step, after you find all the companies that fit your ideal customer profile, that's when you're gonna start doing your outreach, right? So typically how this is gonna happen is, you're gonna find either their email address, you're gonna connect with them on LinkedIn, or if you can get their phone numbers, then you're gonna make a list so you can dial and make phone calls to all these companies. Now, depending on the company you work at or the industry you're working in, your different strategies are going to apply. For some niches, doing cold email works a lot better than cold calling. For other niches, doing cold calls work a lot better than cold email, right? In other niches, well, LinkedIn might be a more viable option, right? So you really want to look at how other people in your industry are generating meetings, and that's typically the one I would recommend when it comes to picking which one you should focus on. And I would actually just focus on one at a time because it's a lot of work to send a cold email, send a LinkedIn messages, and cold calling, and manage all of these different mediums. It's really difficult to do all three at once, so that's why I would recommend, focus on one type of outreach and really mastered that for that specific niche. Because if you think about it like this, if you have one channel that works, let's say it's cold email, why would you even need to cold call or send LinkedIn messages when you already have one thing that works so well? Typically when people say they do cold email, LinkedIn, and cold calling and do all these things at once, most likely they're not generating as many appointments as they would like, because why would you split your attention in three different directions when if one works, just go all in on that, right? So pick the one that really works for you, invest your time into it to master it, and then start generating those leads. Now, once you start sending out your cold emails or LinkedIn messages, or you start doing your cold calls, the next step of the sales prospecting cycle is to actually turn that prospect, meaning, someone you feel might be a good fit for your product and service, and you wanna convert them into an actual meeting, an actual appointment where you're gonna talk to them either over the phone or in person. And why put this as a step is because sometimes when you send out, let's say a message, whether it's LinkedIn or cold email, they may have a question. They might want you to learn a little bit more about you before they agree to spend 30 minutes on the phone with you. And so that's why you have to follow up with people, answer their questions, and you want to keep pushing so that they actually take action meeting with you. And you're not being pushy, you're not forcing them to do anything, you're just kind of handling the objections to say the right things in order for them to get curious enough to take a meeting with you. And you want to think about like this, the only goal of any type of outreach activity, whether it's cold email LinkedIn or cold calling is to set an appointment, right? You're not trying to sell somebody during an email. They're not gonna buy because they read your email, they're gonna buy after they actually meet you in person or if you talk to them over the phone, especially if you're selling something that's a little more high ticket, something that's over a thousand dollars, right? So typically your only goal when it comes to outreach is to get a meeting, right? So you want to hyperfocus on just scheduling an appointment. You wanna keep asking them, does it make sense to talk? Who is the right person to talk to? You want to keep asking these questions until they actually decide to take a meeting with you. And then that's when the selling process actually starts. And once they actually agree to a meeting, they're gonna book an appointment on your calendar, or are they gonna tell you a time when they want you to call them. And what will happen during this first call is that, you're not even selling at this point because you're still in the seals prospecting stage. What you're actually doing is you're qualifying the customer to see if they're a fit to buy your product or service. A lot of times, if you reach out to someone, maybe they're not a good fit, maybe the timing is wrong, maybe they don't have that pain that you solve, or maybe they don't even have the budget to pay for your products or services, right? So that's why the first initial call, instead of selling somebody and telling them that, "Hey, we're so great, "you should buy our product or service." You will first want to identify if they can actually buy, and if your product or service is actually something they need in their business and in their life. Because if there's no real need, there's no real pain, you shouldn't be selling something to someone that they don't actually need. Right? Instead, you want to qualify them, see if they are good fit to buy your products and services. If they are, then you can start pitching your products or services maybe in another meeting, right? Or maybe you can pitch it at the end of the call. But you don't want to start pitching until you qualify the prospect. And I know for some of you guys who might be working at larger organizations where you have a sales development rep and you have account executives and they split these in two different roles, so if your job is to just generate meetings, qualify the person and then schedule another meeting with an account executive who will actually close the deal, then obviously you got to do a good job in making sure that this customer is worth your time, right? Because a sales person's time is very valuable. Don't think of yourself as little, right? Meaning that you're, "Oh, please buy from me," it's not like that. Your time as a sales person, whether you're a sales development rep, business development rep, or an account executive, your time is extremely valuable. So you don't want to waste time with people who are not serious about buying. So you wanna qualify them, see if they are allowed to buy from you, right? Reverse the situation, qualified them to see if they can even buy from you. If they are, then you continue down the sales process and help them make a buying decision. And the last step when it comes to sales prospect is you want to review everything that you just did, right? When it comes to your sales strategy, building the list, the type of outreach you're doing, how many appointments you're setting, and how the qualification call actually went. Right? So when you're analyzing your prospecting activity, you want to find the pieces that you can actually improve. So, a lot of times the sales strategy is the thing that most people need to fix. Maybe they went after the wrong niche, maybe the wrong type of companies, maybe all the companies that they reached out to don't have enough revenue to buy their products and services, so then maybe if they have to go more upmarket and find more companies that actually have more money to spend on your products and services, right? So you definitely want to review your process. And sometimes maybe you did everything right except the qualification call isn't going well, where maybe you're not doing the right things to qualify them, not asking the right questions to see if there might be a good fit, and so you start changing your sales script in order to qualify them better. Right? So every sales situation is going to be different. There can be anything... Any of these pieces can be broken, but you just wanna look at your sales process objectively and see like, okay, what part can I actually improve? Then when you go back and repeat the process, you're gonna do the same exact thing that you did, except you're gonna switch out one part and you're gonna replace it with another and hopefully that will get your sales process more efficient and you get more results at the end, meaning you book more appointments and you close more deals. But if you don't review everything that you're doing, then how can you actually improve? Right? So you want to make sure, especially in the beginning of your sales career, especially when you're starting to do sales prospecting, you're always improving every time you send a campaign. You should be getting better response rates, more qualified meetings, and more people should be interested in your product or service. Theoretically, you should be getting better every step of the way. And so from a high level strategy perspective, that's gonna be the ultimate guide when it comes to sales prospecting and lead generation, no matter what type of outbound activity you decide to do, the strategy is exactly the same. So if you need to rewatch this video to really get a better understanding of it, make sure to rewatch it because these are the foundations if you want to be successful at sales prospecting. And if you enjoy this video, make sure to get it a like, subscribe, and turn on notifications if you wanna see more sales prospecting videos like this. And let me know in the comments, what are some of the challenges you have when it comes to sales prospecting so I can help you guys by making a video about it and sharing what I know and hopes to solve some of your challenges. And if you want to get more in-depth training on how to get a meeting with anyone and sell anything to anyone, I got a free in-depth training. Click the link in the description to get access to that free training now. And if you want to see more videos about sales prospecting, make sure to check out my other sales prospecting videos, the link is gonna be somewhere on the screen. So that said, my name is Patrick Dang, hope you guys got a lot of value out of this video and I am going to see you guys in the next one.