Lead prospecting: a complete guide

Top lead prospecting strategies

Bring your marketing and sales together

Lead gen and lead prospecting work best together. So bring sales and marketing together and align your strategies. Make sure you’re not duplicating your efforts and you’re clear on how a lead can become a prospect.

ICP research

Your ICP is the center of your lead prospecting strategy. To target the right people or businesses to become qualified leads, you need to up your research. Think about:

• Their needs and pain points
• The size of their company
• Who the decision makers are

Get some more pointers and  learn how to use data to refine your ICP (and grab some free ICP templates).

Lead scoring

Setting up a lead scoring model (like our one below) will help you qualify prospects and prioritize who to contact first. Use a scoring system alongside your ICP to work out:

• Which potential customers have the biggest pain points your product or service can help
• Who’s most likely to move through your sales funnel and engage with your sales team

Personalization

Take all that intel and turn it into a personalized experience for your prospects. Your first phone call should make them feel like they don’t need to reel off a list of pain points, needs, and desires to you because you already know them. Prepare in advance by tailoring a pitch that can work over the phone or email.

Build relationships

Another huge part of prospecting to make it successful is to build relationships with your prospects. Do more individualized research to understand them. Do some social listening, read their blogs, and read their reviews.

So now you’ve personalized your first contact with them and they want to engage more. This is your time to follow up with them consistently and keep communication lines open. Strike the balance between speaking to them regularly without hounding them.

Analyze, learn, and iterate

A staple of any campaign activity, you need to analyze how it’s going and tweak where necessary. Look at how well you’ve managed to:

• Understand their problems and react to them
• Move them through the sales funnel
• Get them to engage with the right content to help their decision-making process.

You’ll also need to look at your own processes. Are you in budget? Have you scheduled the right amount of time to spend contacting prospects? Have you stuck to your timelines? Evaluate how your sales and marketing teams are working together too.

Lead prospecting best practices

Stay ahead of the competition

Keep an eye on your competitors. Have a snoop around to see what their tactics are and how they’re interacting with prospects. Think about strategies that you could use to make you stand out from them.

Nail your ICP

We’ve not stopped talking about your ICP, but we need to drum in on how important it is in lead prospecting.
Get your ICP right at the beginning and you’ll save time further down the line. If you don’t, you may as well be doing a lead generation campaign and trying to hook a wider customer demographic. Your ICP will help you to target the right people, the first time around.

Don’t engage then leave them to it

The crux of lead prospecting is building meaningful relationships. This will give you a higher chance of immediate conversion and repeat buying in the future.

Sales need to hand-hold through the whole process. They need to make sure prospects:

• Feel understood by you
• Get the chance to engage with all the relevant content to help their buying decision
• Have built a level of trust with your business.

Consistent communication is where it’s at – that could be a mixture of regular phone calls or emails, or more interactive content like webinars or events. Today, you can send personalized and interactive sales proposals, pitch decks, or brochures – and see exactly who is reading your content.

Use automation tools

Of course, when the ball’s rolling, it can be tricky to keep on top of all your prospects and where they’re at in their journey. So use automation tools wherever you can to make your lives easier. We’re talking automated emails with the next piece of relevant information or content, booking in phone calls, or directing them to the next piece of content in your sales funnel.

Turtl takeaway

Once you’ve brought in those leads, they need to journey to the end of the funnel. And how can you do that? With a smart, sleek lead management strategy.
Want step-by-step instructions on how to build one of your very own? Dive into our guide ‘Optimizing the MQL” below.

Click to read Optimizing the MQL