Top Tips to Master Prospecting using Salesforce
5 min
Prospective customers can be tracked in Salesforce as Leads. Once a Lead becomes qualified, you can convert it to an Account and Contact. And the potential sale to an Opportunity! All of the information that you’ve collected on your lead record can be mapped over to the Account, Contact, and, optionally, Opportunity records.
Strategic prospecting is a craft, and honing your skills in this area will serve you well. Four phases of the selling process were identified in the early 1900s; Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Most prospects still go through each of these phases.
Prospecting zones in on Attention, generating awareness of your product or service and Interest, prompting curiosity and a desire to learn more. Create the spark, and later, with the right fuel, your prospects are more likely to progress to the later phases of the selling process.
Various sales techniques can burn out quickly with overuse. By developing a prospecting strategy, you’ll be able to manage your time and put the appropriate focus on each lead. After all, each lead is a prospective sale!
- Advantages To Tracking Your Leads In Salesforce
- Tracking your prospects in Salesforce improves business performance. Leads can be batch loaded, created manually, and automatically captured through the lead generation processes.
- It’s important to have a single source of truth - a best practice to consider developing and internally promoting is the mindset that “if it isn’t in Salesforce, it doesn’t exist”.
- The “Log a Call” feature makes it easy to capture call history on your lead record. And for most businesses, it makes sense to have a few personalized templates available to “Send an Email”.
- Finally, if a prospect has been touched on in a marketing campaign, that will be visible in the Campaign History.
Utilizing Salesforce as your single source of truth saves time for the salesperson and allows more robust marketing activities. In addition to preserving your sanity whenever sales territories are realigned, a prospect reaches out and contacts somebody higher up the ladder in your organization or if a salesperson leaves the company. Details and activity related to a prospect have been captured and readily available on the lead record.
Top Tips To Master Prospecting Using Salesforce
1. Use Tier Levels To Rank Prospects
Using Tier Levels to rank your prospects helps segment your prospective opportunities to sell and allows you to focus the right amount of time and energy on each lead. All prospects are not equal. Lead Tier Levels are easy to implement and manage. You can get more complex later in the pipeline with additional fields to rank customers after converting a lead to an opportunity, if you’re selling a variety of extremely different products or have unique purchasing requirements. Start simple and segment your prospects on the lead object.
- Add a custom Lead picklist field “Tier Level” with a few options to bucket your prospects:
- Tier 1 - These are your “Hot” leads. The prospects that are most likely to be interested and actually make a purchase. You’ll want to focus on them with a high-touch approach. Prospects that you think will convert to an opportunity more rapidly are Tier 1.
- Tier 2 - Place your “Warm” or luke-warm prospects that aren’t ready for high-level engagement, but can be developed over time with a little more effort on your part, into Tier 2.
- Tier 3 - This will likely be the category that most of your prospects fall into. This larger lead pool will require several touches and nurturing over a longer period of time before entering your sales process.
- Tier 4 - there will be a few prospects where you only have a little scrap of information. If you don’t have an email address and phone number, chances are the prospect is extremely “Cold”, aka Tier 4.
2. Identify Your Most Profitable Prospecting Methods Using Lead Source
Some of your prospecting methods will be more profitable than others. Fine-tune your Lead Source picklist so that you can easily identify which methods produce revenue. For example,instead of having a lead source option for “Ad Campaign” or “Social Media”, consider dialing this in at a lower level to provide greater visibility.
By having options for Facebook, Tik Tok, YouTube, Google Ads, etc., you can see where your marketing spend is most effective at generating new prospects.
3. Use Lead Status To Track Progression In Your Sales Process
Lead Status should identify where a prospect is at in your sales process. It’s important to track the current status of each potential opportunity to convert a prospect to the selling phase and which leads are involved in marketing campaigns.
4. Web-To-Lead
Using Web-to-Lead in Salesforce is straightforward. If you have a company website, you’re really missing out on a hot prospecting opportunity if you don’t utilize this functionality. Leverage your business website!
- Create a form so that prospects can submit themselves into your lead queue.
- Keep it simple.
- For many successful prospectors, Name, Phone and Email are the only fields required.
- If you offer a variety of products, add a few checkboxes where your lead can select which items they’re most interested in learning more about.
- Realtors may want to ask when the prospect anticipates moving.
- You can add a field asking for their preferred method of contact, or the best time to contact them.
- Add a field to help determine Tier Level. For example, if you’re in the solar industry, you might want to ask what their average monthly electric bill is.
- If you perform maintenance services, you could ask when the next service or inspection is due.
- Try to keep your form to a single page on a desktop, less than two pages on a mobile device, and don’t make every field required in order to submit the form.
Once you have a “Contact Us” type form created on your website, You can map your lead fields in Salesforce and it will literally generate the required HTML needed to bring this to life. You can also use a third-party tool like Zapier to easily port data from your website form to create lead records.
5. Lead Assignment
A lot of companies assign leads to users, primarily Sales Reps, by geographic location or territory. Others assign new incoming leads to Lead Queues.
Again, Salesforce makes it fairly simple to implement whichever option works best for your company! Your CRM Administrator can set Lead Assignment Rules up pretty quickly. There are plenty of Trailhead training modules to help, most of which are 30 minutes or less to complete.
6. Spark Interest In Your Product
Utilize tier level to filter marketing campaigns! Frequently change your messaging, keep the content fresh and interesting, and try to add value with each touch. You don’t want to repeatedly push out the same email to a prospect. Aim to say something different each time.
- Tier Level should help determine how frequently you contact a prospect:
- Tier 1 Prospects should be contacted most often. Set reminders for yourself to reach out via phone and schedule email campaigns.
- Tier 2 Prospects require less contact. A good rule of thumb is that for every two emails you send, make one phone call.
- Tier 3 Prospects will prefer to be contacted less often, and probably only via email.
- Tier 4 Prospects will likely require more research. If you have an email address, pull them into email marketing campaigns along with the leads in Tier 3.
7. Review Online Presence
Take a few minutes to research your prospects online. Perform a Google search on the company and/or person name. View available social media profiles that come up. Reach out to shared connections to see if they can facilitate an introduction or provide additional insight. Try to gain insight into their business model, needs, likes and dislikes. Follow your prospects on LinkedIn.
Sometimes it can pay off to be a little bolder and occasionally comment or like posts that are applicable to your product, services, or shared personal interests.
8. Identify Prospects With The Authority To Purchase
Whenever possible, direct your message to members of the C-level leadership team. Remember, prospecting is about generating awareness and piquing interest. You may get the opportunity to have a strategic conversation, or your communication could be passed down a level or two in the organization.
If your communication is passed down the ladder, it’s highly likely they will reach out to follow up with you - and that they’ll be a decision maker or influence purchases. A boss might ask them to debrief or overview what they found out in the not-too-distant future.
9. Advise And Sell, Sell, Sell
Prospecting is the first step to developing a robust pipeline of potential customers. It can position you as a trusted advisor and help you focus sales efforts on the right accounts. Utilizing out-of-the-gate Salesforce functionality can dramatically streamline lead generation. It allows you to focus on specific messaging based on Tier Level and Lead Status, contact potential customers at the right time, use email campaigns effectively, and identify your most effective prospecting avenues.
Final Thoughts
It’s not about the number of phone calls or emails that you generate, it’s about taking a realistic and well-defined approach to reach the potential customers most likely to convert to a sale. When you grab the attention of a prospect and create interest, you better understand their needs and increase the probability of creating desire.
Focus on developing a relationship with your prospects, and remember that sometimes, less is more.
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