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- Sales prospecting is one of the most important aspects when it comes to sales and business development. If a company isn't able to do sales prospecting successfully, while they literally don't have a business because they can't even generate any revenue. So in this video, I'm gonna show you exactly what sales prospecting is, how it works and whether or not it's something you should be interested in. (upbeat music) What's going on everybody? It's Patrick Dang here, before we get started make sure to give this video a like, subscribe and turn on notifications, and let's go ahead and dive in. So the first question we gotta answer is, what exactly is sales prospecting? And the definition we are gonna use in this video is the act of identifying potential customers and generating appointments. So originally the idea of prospecting was meant for people who were participating in the Gold Rush in America. And so there are all these people moving to California and they would literally go by the rivers with their pans and filters, and they would scoop up dirt in the river and try to look for gold. And sometimes once in a while, someone would get lucky and they would find a little piece of gold and other people, well, actually, most people, were totally out of luck. And that's the idea of prospecting. You're looking for an opportunity to make money from finding gold. Now, although we are not panning for gold anymore because obviously it's not really working and didn't work back back then. The term has kind of changed for the modern sales world where prospecting is now when a sales person or business development person goes out looking for different companies and individuals that they would like to work with and see whether or not it's a good fit to actually try to sell to them. Sometimes your prospects, people that you want to work with will say yes, most of the times they'll say no but that's basically the process. You get more nos than you do yes. But if you keep on doing it and you're consistent, eventually you get enough yeses to make the entire process worth it. So now that you have an overall understanding of what prospecting is, now we're gonna dive a little deeper, so you can understand what an ideal customer profile is. Now when it comes to prospecting, so let's say you are a salesperson and business development person or maybe you're an entrepreneur. And you are trying to sell your products and services to other businesses. The first step of this entire process is to actually identify your ideal customer profile. And that basically means asking the question who is it that you are trying to reach out to? Now although this sounds very simple on the surface level, if you actually get this process wrong it doesn't even matter what you do later on in the sales cycle, whether you send emails, cold calls, how you run in your sales meeting presentation negotiations does not matter if you are not in front of the right person. So that's when it really comes down to sales strategy. So a big question is how do you know exactly who you should be selling to. Do you just make an educated guess, or some people might randomly just make an educated guess, but for what we're gonna do, I'm gonna show you a framework so that you can identify your ideal customer profile much more easily. Now this is gonna be three variables that you're gonna need when you identify your ideal profile. The first one is going to be industry. This one is very obvious. So what industry are you selling it to? Is it selling into hospitals? Or selling into retail, finance? So you wanna understand generally what is that industry? From there, the next step is to understand within that industry, what is the pain, what's the problem, or bleeding neck problem that people have that they're willing to spend money to make go away. A lot of people, maybe they wanna increase revenues or maybe they have some kind of costs that are too expensive and they need to lower costs. Or maybe they have trouble hiring great people. So whatever the case is, in any business there are always gonna be problems that people are willing to pay money to make go away. So if you kind of positioned yourself, in this industry and you can solve a specific problem that people have money to spend on, well, it's gonna be a lot more easier for you to sell your products and services. And the last variable is pleasure. So once you understand a person's problems the next step is to visualize how your product and service actually takes them away from their problems and totally makes it go away and puts them in the state of pleasure. Because the strongest two emotions to get someone to take an action is pain and pleasure. So if you get rid of the pain and you show them that if they purchase your products and services bring them to pleasure, well, it's gonna be a lot more easier for you to prospect, get more meetings with your ideal customers and ultimately close more deals. So now that you understand that you need to identify your customer because it essentially is one of the most important parts of sales, the next step is how do you actually get a meeting with these people? And that's where we're gonna talk about outbound prospecting. Now, outbound prospecting, when it comes to sales is essentially when a sales or business development person working at a company or maybe they got their own business reaches out to another company that they would like to work with. And a lot of times the company that they're reaching out to has no idea who this company is, it's completely cold, and you're kind of just sending an unsolicited message. Now, the question you might have why would somebody who has no idea who you are respond to a message from you? Whether it's an email, cold call, LinkedIn friend requests whatever the case is, why would they respond? Now, here's the thing, with outbound prospecting you're trying to reach high level decision makers who can make a decision on whether or not they should buy your products and services. And as I said before if you identified a pain within an industry that many people have, they are a willing to already pay money to make that pain go away. In some cases, they might be already looking for a solution. So when you send them an email, perfect timing because they have a problem, they're looking for a solution, you just happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right solution, making it easier to sell. Now, a lot of times, prospects don't even know they have a problem, but they might have it. So sometimes when a sales person sends a cold email, they make the prospect aware that they actually have a problem, and they make the prospect intrigued to actually take a meeting with that salesperson to see whether or not this salesperson can help them solve their problem. Long story short, the reason for why decision makers respond to strangers, is because if you kind of show that you can solve a problem that people have, even if they don't know who you are there willing to take a meeting with you. And, especially if they have been already trying to solve this problem on their own, and they're not able to do it, well, they're more open to talking to strangers. And that's just how it works. And for me, I get cold emails all the time as I run my own business. And, I would say 90% of the emails that I get I actually do not respond because their offer is not good, and they're not addressing a problem that I specifically have. However, for 10% of the people that email me, I actually do respond, I do sometimes take meetings with people who want to offer me something just to see whether or not they can help me because I might have a certain problem in my business and I'm looking for a solution. And if they got the solution, I'm willing to take 15 minutes out of my day to take a phone call. So for you and your specific sale in your specific industry you need to first do a little research on what the best outbound strategies are within your industry. Now, for some industries cold email works amazingly well and that's all you need to do. Other industries, cold email may not work at all and everybody's doing cold calling, so you might have to cold call. So, when you ask yourself, which one should you do? Well, do a little research on Google and type in, how are other people generating leads in your specific industry? And that's the one I would recommend you start with. So if you find that let's say cold email it works really well in your industry, for example, if you're selling tech cold email does really work. Then what you wanna do is you want to maybe send let's say like 50 to 70 emails every day to different people. And every week you would follow up with these people and try to get meetings. And the whole process of outbound prospecting the only goal really in that email is to actually generate a meeting with a high level decision maker, get them on the phone and qualify them, have them have a conversation to see whether or not they're interested to move forward in your sales cycle. If they're easy fit to work together, they move on to whatever the next step is, whether it's a presentation, demonstration, technical call, whatever it is. But if you find on the first call that it's not a fit totally fine, then you disqualify them and say, "Okay it looks like we're not "a good fit to work together, thanks for your time, and then see you later." And then you move on to the next prospect. And that's pretty much the game of prospecting. And over time, as you become better at sales prospect and you refine your message a little bit more and you have a better pulse on what the market actually wants, every time you do a prospecting campaign either you're trying different new ideas or you're refining previous ideas and making a sharper and better and better. So ideally, when you're doing prospecting, let's say you're sending cold emails, you might get 10% response rate, not bad. And then, when you get on the phone with these people and you try to sell them and see what works and what doesn't, your next campaign, you use all the information that you learned on that phone call to refine your sales prospecting strategy so that your response rate, if you're going for the same market, but you're just expanding, well, they should actually be more likely to respond. So you might get 10% response rate, next time 15%, next time 20%, so you should always be getting better and better at this process. So the first time, you do any type of sales prospecting, it's not gonna be that great, you're doing it for the first time, but as you get better and you start to understand how it works and how you can actually get meetings, you should have this feedback loop of learning, what works, learning what doesn't and getting better at the process. And so with that said, that is basically sales prospecting in a nutshell. And if you enjoyed this video, make sure to give it a like, subscribe and turn on notifications, if you wanna see more sales and lead generation videos like this. And let me know in the comments what's the number one thing that you learned in this video? And it's really interesting for me to hear, and let me know in the comments, what kind of videos you wanna see next, whether it's sales, sales prospecting, lead generation, because I'm always open to hear what challenges you guys have. So I can help solve those challenges by making a simple video. So with that said, my name is Patrick Dang, and I am gonna see you guys in the next one.