May The Fourth Be With You When Sales Prospecting

If you’re a Jedi, your power comes from The Force, but if you’re prospecting for sales, your power comes from closing a deal. It may not be as exciting, but when it comes to sales prospecting, it’s just as important.

So, to become the Luke Skywalker of sales, think of us as your Yoda, and this blog as your sales prospecting training. To help you awaken The (sales) Force within you, and close more deals, start by following these four steps when prospecting for sales.

Step Wan: Divide and Conquer – The first order of business is to establish who you’re targeting. Just like The Empire targets the resistance, you need to identify who you’re going after. Establish what your ideal customer or client looks like, and then use that to segment your outreach by market appropriately. This is important because it allows you to target your messaging and customize your approach so you can engage with the right prospects. You can segment by things like value, need, region or industry.

Step Two: Measure Success To See If EWoks (it works) –  Once you’ve segmented your market and customized your approach, you’ll need to determine how you’re going to measure the success of your new strategy. This is where KPI’s, or Key Performance Indicators, come into play. If your job involves prospecting for sales, you likely already have KPI’s in place, but if not, that is where you need to start. KPI’s can be used to measure a number of things, such as: lead conversion rates, sales cycles, email opens and click throughs. Having these in place will give you something to measure against when seeing how successful your new strategy is.

Step Three: The Approach Awakens– Now that you’ve measured your success and you know what it looks like, it’s time to create the actual approach itself. As far as prospecting for sales goes, we suggest taking an account-based approach. In other words, don’t target just one person at a company, target the company as a whole. This will allow you to successfully engage both the decision makers and potential users.

Step Four: Use ‘The Force’ of Personalization