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6 Ways To Make Your Printing Business Most Profitable

Picture of Emmanuel Amoh

Sales prospecting is important in business because it can make your business the most profitable if you follow guided prospecting processes.  “Sales are the ultimate source of revenue generation for a company to survive in the market”. They play a major role in a company’s growth and progress. And good prospecting strategy in place ensures that every lead you talk to is genuinely a good fit for your product. It also ensures the potential to be a good fit. While you won’t know for sure until you carry out the lead qualification process, you can save a significant amount of time by researching potential In this post, we would outline various processes and key strategies for sales prospecting, and take you through the selling stage which is the most difficult to navigate through.

So as we start we ask ourselves what is sales prospecting

Sales prospecting is a process that guides salespersons as they develop new businesses. Businesses need potential buyers, leads or clients to buy their products and services. The idea is to search for these targets, put them in a flywheel and eventually convert them into customers to make their business most profitable. Only 24% of sales emails are opened. 50% of your prospects are not a good fit for what you sell. Six (6) in Ten (10) buyers want to discuss pricing. Nine (9) in Ten (10) buying decisions are made with a peer recommendation. Without peer recommendation, sales prospecting seems tedious, because in the build-up to actually “selling” to the prospect you have the benefit of qualifying the lead—and that’s why sales prospecting is a much better way to develop new business. Now let’s get into the details.

Who is a prospect?

A prospect is an individual or organisation that fits certain criteria outlined by a company based on its business offerings. In short, a prospect is a potential client or customer. This description is not the same as a lead —who is a person or an organisation that has shown interest in your blog or website by signing up or subscribing to your newsletter. Such contact is always determined to fit during the sales qualifying process. After the prospect is qualified he enters the flywheel or the buyer’s journey.

Sales prospecting to make your business profitable

Sales Prospecting usually starts with research, of individuals and organisations. During the  research stage, salespersons:

Learn About the Company

  • Number of Employees
  • Product or Service Offerings
  • Executive, customers,
  • Growing, mature etc
  • Social media profiles: check LinkedIn and Twitter.

Also, check the Website’s about and contact pages for additional information on how you can help them achieve their goals. Do they have contact information for certain areas, such as “please contact anyone@company.com for all marketing inquiries”?

Work on the Ideal customer profile:

  1. Demographics; (who they are), industry
  2. Psycho-graphics; (how they think)
    1. Culture: open to ideas and change, flexible and agile
    2. Growth orientation: Focused on growth, testing new ideas
    3. Technology Adaptations: Early adopters of new technologies
  3.   Behavioural: (how they act)
    1. Engagement: Conduct research and consume lots of content from various sources before making decisions
    2. Buying process: Team-based, typically initiated by a department, then moves to a cross-functional team
  • Environment: (their situation)
    1. Communications Landscape: They provide communication products to fill several businesses’ communication touch-points.
    2. Geographic Location: Based in Ghana
    3. Alignment with Marketing and Sales: Marketing is supportive but needs to align with sales to close deals faster.

Check buyer persona:

1. Habits and skills, Likes and dislikes

2. buying power, education, media, decision-making, income, etc

Learning about prospects before engaging them would certainly help you know whom you want to reach, what challenges they have, aspirations, goals and who they are. These findings could help you provide offers that will increase the likelihood of closing the sale.

Prepare a personalised pitch for each prospect

Email or Cold Call

Email

    1. Cold email-
    2. 1st touch emails
    3. Follow-up emails
    4. Break-up emails
    5. Influencer outreach (existing relationship, new relationship, back-links, etc

Call

    1. Develop a pre-call planning worksheet
    2. Develop a call structure
      1. Steps- Establish rapport—like asking how a prospect weekend was or what team they are rooting for in a game tonight. Initiate touches to help develop a more meaningful conversation.
      2. Leverage pain points: and dive into their pain points during the call. By the end of the conversation, we should know their primary business challenges and underlying causes.
      3. Create curiosity: Ask questions about their business. Ask more than telling. Talk less about your product.
      4. Wrap it up: Find a calendar time between 24-48 calendar hours, after the discovery call, to book a follow-up meeting.

Want to know more? Click on the image below to download the sales prospecting guide to start talking to prospects like real sales professionals.

Download Your Free Sales Prospecting Guide