Streamline your sales lead pipeline for Quality Assurance

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ask a brand new sales rep what the most important skill is and you know what they'll say they'll say closing that's what we always hear right both of you asked that 20-year veteran who's seen a thing or two they'll tell you that the most important skill isn't closing it's Prospect and as founder of 10 bound David Delaney recently told me on an episode of the salesman podcast being able to do your own prospecting you'll never starve but I didn't take it one step further nail down how to prospect like a pro and you're gonna live like King [Music] hi my name is Will and I make selling simple now today's video is all about prospecting and I'm going to take you through one of our most important Frameworks that we have over at salesman.com Academy it's called the prospect list building framework the naming system that we use is not very imaginative and it consists of just four simple steps we're going to refine your ICP or deal customer Persona we're going to create a test audience we're going to test that audience and then we're going to either scale or change that's the final step and throughout this video I'm going to drop some actionable tips and specific tools that you can use along the way to get this done I want you to drill this into your head because prospecting is probably the most valuable skill that you can learn in your entire career never mind just your sales or business career and as Cardone Enterprises VP of sales Jared glunt told me on an episode of the show recently I would rather have a salesperson that could get in the door on the front end and create an opportunity in the first place then somebody who sucks on the front side of it but uh you know is is average at the end does that make sense so let's jump into the first step of framework Step One is refining your IC or your ideal customer Persona and these are essentially your perfect buyers under the prospects you want to be focusing on the most throughout your prospecting and just sales process in general and here are some qualities to look for when you're trying to identify your ICP they are the easiest to close they have a pain points that you solve they understand your product's value they offer the fewest objections when you do engage with them and they are urgently ready to buy all these attributes lead up to one a shorter sales cycle two higher profit margins and three for you importantly right as this person in the trench is the salesperson engaging with your prospects number three an easier less stressful sales process for you and for them as well now identifying your ICP takes a little bit of work but you can start by looking at your past customers who had the shortest contract to sales psych from there you can bring in more data points by considering how large the sale was because obviously we want to do bigger sales rather than smaller ones we can look at whether they became repeat buyers and if they provided a glowing testimonial or even a referral for you to get more business through the door and for an even more in-depth dive into your ICP make sure to check out our value proposition design framework and video that I'll link below this video okay so once you've got about 20 to 40 past customers that fit this categorization it's time to figure out what have they got in common with each other to do that we're going to list out seven components for each of our 20 to 40 ideal customer personas and we're going to look at Job titles Industries the location of the organization the company size current goals the main pain points that they have the previous solutions that they implemented to try and solve these pain points and with a little bit of work at this point and a little bit of research online you can be able to cross-reference the best customers with these different categories and that's going to allow you to uncover the criteria that they've got in common and general trends that you see among the majority of them I remember the details don't need to perfectly align here we're looking for broader Trends across our ICP but the closer the match between the trends of these good organizations have bought from us have been easy to work work with the large deals the easier step two is going to be and step two is creating our new test audience so with your ICP outline detailed now it's time to create your test audience essentially what we're going to do here is build a small list of prospects that match our ICP and then validate these new prospects by entering them into a small sales Cadence and all this will become more clear as we go through the rest of the steps in this process but depending on the success rate of your Outreach at the end of the process you can then scale up your audience or if it doesn't work out go back to the drawing board and redefine your ICP until you get better results because we don't want to build a list of potential customers that then we reach out to and they don't reply to us because it was a waste of time creating the list sending out the messages in a waste of their time going through their inboxes and deleting them as well so the question is how do you build this list of companies that look similar to our ideal customer Persona that we identified in the first step announce to this in the age of Internet selling is LinkedIn sales LinkedIn sales Navigator is a great tool and just so it's out there they've sponsored our content podcast stuff in the past but I use it myself every single day this tool allows you to plug in the details the criteria that we outlined in step one of your prospects and then it'll populate a whole new list of potential customers based upon the data that you in but it and because it's based on and built upon the largest Professional Network in the world you're never going to run out of sales leads so for new or unvalidated icps so you've just done this first step and you've never worked on this process in the past we're going to start by building a list an audience of around 40 new potential customers conversely if you've done this before and you're pretty certain that your ICP is correct accurate then we can build a list of 150 we can go out then instead but a bit of a pro tip here remember to start small with your audience at first the entire goal of this exercise is to quickly test and then document the results and refine your ICP and your Cadence ingly the bigger the audience that you go after or the broader the categories and the trends within your ICP the longer this whole process is going to take and the less refined you're going to be at the end of it but don't worry once you get your ICP right and then you can build prospecting lists based upon it over and over and over we can scale this up over time so there's opportunity to do tons of Outreach but let's get it right in the first instance so that we're scaling good rather than getting it wrong and then we start scaling crap you're not going to get any replies if you go down that route anyway all right step three is all about testing the new audience that we've just created this is where we're going to run our list through a short Cadence and we're going to check out the results nothing too special here just start from the top and work your way down add them to your sales Cadence or even just a couple of emails that show your value proposition and hey would you like to book a meeting that's all we need what we're trying to do here is see if we get any replies to the value proposition that we're sending out to them even better if we get some meetings but because that means there are hypothesis about the ideal customer Persona or ICP then translated to this new list of potential customers and then they in turn responded to our value proposition they actually give a they actually care about what we're selling once you get these steps nailed we can then move on to the final step of this framework and this is where things start to get excited and if you want a kpi or number to hit here make sure that your response rate is at least five percent before you move on to this next step so for example if you build a list of 40 people you get them through your Cadence you've got to book more than a couple of meetings for this to account as a success before you can start to scale it from 40 to 400 to 4 000 over time which then brings us on to the next and final step of this process we've got to decide whether we need to change or whether we need to scale so as I said if you're below a five percent success rate the answer is really simple your ICP your value proposition or your Cadence is not a good fit you need to get your head down you need to go back to the drawing board have a think about what other similarities that your ideal buyers had that your ideal prospects the ubiquist on perhaps didn't what can you test what other Trends are there that you can Implement and how do we get replies to our messages and the cool thing is that you start to build a feedback loop here so let's say you did get that five to ten to 20 response rate on your ideal customer Persona when you email them your value proposition in the test element of this framework well look at the people who replied what job titles do they have what industries are they in describe them write down the trends you see in the people who you reached out to and got a response from then feed that back into the top of the process and find more and more of those people the goal is to narrow all of this down and Niche it down over time so that you know to a reasonably high probability that when you reach out to people who have these five six seven different criteria points you're more likely not going to get a response make a new hypothesis jump back on that horse test again and keep iterating until you hit at least at least a minimum of a five percent response rate once you hit that magic five number now you can start scaling your sales Navigator audience and build a monster list of people to go after month in month out until eventually obviously the market will change or the product will change or a competitor will come along but till that moment until there's a big swooping or a recession comes along and wipes out a ton of opportunities in the marketplace but until that big trigger event comes now you just keep plowing these individuals through your sales Pipeline and closing them at the far end of it with a little bit of refining and tweaking you can easily turn that five percent minimum number that kpi into a 20 success rate with your sales Cadence that means for every five of your ideal customer Sona you reach out to you're booking one meeting with them and then you just do this over and over month one 100 prospects month two 150 prospects month three you get to 200 prospects through the pipeline your ideal customer personas and then maybe it's just too many meetings to do which is a great problem to have of course so then you narrow down things even further right and you keep doing this over and over and over again and that is it for the rest of your sales career the goal is to reach out to as fewer people as possible and close as many and as a bigger deals on the back of it as you can so there you have it four steps to building a sales prospecting list that's going to keep you bustling with business for the rest of your sales create remember you just got to refine your ideal customer Persona create your test audience test the audience which most salespeople never get around to doing then decide whether you need to scale or whether you need to change things oh and the best of all you can keep iterating on your success again and again and again that's going to mean progressively better customers better close rates and ultimately the more successful sales career so there we go if you enjoyed this video why not click the video it's on the screen right now continue making selling