1. Prospecting

To prospect smarter, it is important to understand your market and your target. The following are some ideas what your SaaS business must address. First lets’ define [Incoming] leads as potential customers who’ve expressed interest in your company through behaviors like visiting your website, subscribing to your blog, or signing up for a free trial of your offer. The marketing function is generally tasked to qualify if they are a prospect for those in sales.

Sales may target [outgoing] prospects that can be classified as a potential customer even if they have limited or no interaction with your company depending on their qualifications and fit. Both should be nurtured by marketing. To refine prospects further, they may be first a suspect that fit the prospect profile but have not been contacted. While prospects in general represent potential customer profile that have been contacted and are qualified at some level of interest.

Prospecting is the first step in the sales process and to be effective requires consistent application during recommend times of the week below, as well as throughout the month. The myth is keeping pace with a benchmark for a number of calls, but what really counts is learning and expanding upon ‘how to’ gain conversational moments with the prospect to qualify out the bad, and in the good.

42% of sales reps named prospecting as the most challenging stage of the sale process, Hubspot study

Planning Smartly

The initial planning math is simple: the more prospects you generate, the more chances to close a sale you have, as the ‘right’ prospect equals an opportunity. Time is not so simple given higher than usual expectations today for fast results.

That said do you smell it? The sales cycle’s change, where the buyer is in charge.

• 45% (almost half!) of prospects are researching for their needs on their own before contacting sales per CSO Insights. Some studies have it higher.
• 95% of buyers research online before making purchases accoridng to Accenture and
• 53% of buyers also turn to social media to make buying decisions per Fronetics

Good news: what hasn’t change: people buy from people. Where

91% of prospects don’t mind engaging with a sales rep in the early stages of their buying journey, CSO Insights

Better news: you can control how smart you prospect by planning how to find the ‘right’ prospects. Certainly the sales style is likely servant given the prospect is in charge.

More Math and Statistics

Proceeding with prospecting begins with expanding on the math, or what’s your quota? For example, it is $1 million annually. What’s the average sale? It is $50,000. Therefore you need to close under approximately 2 deals a month. What’s the average close ratio? Say it is 20%, then you are likely qualifying approximately 10 prospects a month to close. Similarly you will likely earn these prospects qualifying 20% of 50 leads or suspects a month. Presumably, you are qualifying by phone where it takes on average 8 calls for each just to get a conversation kick-started. This leads to an initial goal of 20 prospecting calls in a working day minimum. Where 20 calls at ideally five minutes length of conversation each represents approximately two hours of your work day, or a quarter of your day. While 81,6% of top performing salespeople spend 4 hours or more per day on sales-related activities, sales insights lab research. That said consider the following statistics courtesy of Brevet Group:

• If you have existing customers or business relationships, then salespeople who actively ask referrals earn 4 to 5 times more than those who don’t. Consider 91% of customers say they’d give referrals. But only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals
• 30-50% of sales go to the salesperson that responds first be to a lead or qualifying a prospect.
  As you make prospecting calls (to qualified incoming leads or outgoing prospects), the best day to call in order is Thursday, Wednesday and Tuesday
• Meantime 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after the meeting. But 44% of sales reps give up after 1 follow-up.
• Only 13% of customers believe a sales person can understand their needs. Hence the importance of a conversation to gain this understanding
• In a typical firm with 100-500 employees, an average of 7 people are involved in most buying decisions.

Suggested Prospecting Cadence

Prospecting is the ‘heart and soul’ of your sales success. Two to four hours a day is what you aim for to factor in for prospecting during the week. Other hours will be for qualifying, follow up, and calls to understand their needs through to following up with the other people involved in the decision. Therefore you could load up on prospecting during ideal days of Tuesday afternoon plus full days of Wednesday and Thursday for maximum twenty hours of prospecting. Monday and Friday are for researching your prospects needs and getting answers, improving your messaging through completing administrative sales task about your prospect and more. During a week where you are focusing to close opportunities, you might reduce prospecting to ten hours, but no less than four hours during the week. The balance is focused on closing follow up.

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Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. —Dale Carnegie