Prospecting is an essential part of any sales position, and a good salesperson is always on the lookout for new strategies for adding more prospects to their sales pipeline. Keep reading as we explore several sales prospecting techniques that can be used to find more leads across various platforms and keep those sales pipelines full!
Sales Prospecting Techniques or Sources for New Leads
1. LinkedIn Lead Generation
Linkedin prospecting is probably something you’re already familiar with to some degree. It is one of the most powerful sales prospecting techniques when used to its full potential.
While a thorough breakdown of all the features of LinkedIn is beyond the scope of this particular article, here are some of the main prospecting features that your salespeople should be familiar with:
Industry Groups
Join LinkedIn groups for your industry or the industries of your target markets.
Customer Demographic groups
Join LinkedIn groups that correspond to demographic info aligned with your target markets.
Search Tools to Connect with New Prospects
LinkedIn has a powerful search feature lets you quickly find countless professionals for various criteria.
Using LinkedIn for Outreach
Similar to how your sales staff likely does outreach via email, you can follow a similar approach with direct outreach on Linkedin. You start with a connection request and then send follow-up messages to those who accept (important note: don’t be direct sales – instead, use a more helpful networking approach). Once you have some proper campaigns going, you might even find that for your particular offer, LinkedIn outreach works better than email outreach.
Scraping Contact Info
LinkedIn can also give you a list of prospects with email addresses included when combined with other tools! Follow the previous steps to create your list of LinkedIn profile prospects, and then you can run those profiles through a tool like FindThatLead, which scrapes public online info to try to match the profiles to emails and other contact info (usually worked for about 40% of Linkedin profiles – we go into more detail about these types of tools and how they work in prospecting strategy #3)
If you’d like a deep dive into sales tactics for LinkedIn, here are some resources that might come in handy:
- 9 Little-Known Ways to Find New Prospects on LinkedIn
- The complete guide to building your lead generation strategy on LinkedIn
2. Twitter Lead Generation
While not as powerful as LinkedIn, Twitter can also be useful for finding new prospects that engage with certain keywords or follow certain Twitter accounts (like your competitors).
- Make a list of the 3-5 keywords that are popular among your target market
- Use Twitter’s search with several variations of each keyword, which will lead you to Twitter users who are tweeting about it
- Keep an eye out for two types of people: 1) those who are likely prospects and 2) those who probably aren’t prospects themselves but whose followers would be good prospects
- Create your list of prospects
- Consider adding prospect info to a spreadsheet and using an app such as FindThatLead to automatically find associated email addresses for 40-50% of them.
- Or use a tool like Phantombuster to scrape the Twitter profiles of a competitor’s followers, and then take that resulting spreadsheet of Twitter profiles and use FindThatLead to find the emails for them.
- You can use Twitter lists to organize prospects as well as manually
Once you’ve started to build your list of prospects from Twitter, you will likely find that engaging with those prospects is better done off Twitter. However, it’s worth testing if connecting directly on Twitter works for your particular industry or offering.
Many Twitter users will link to their website in their bio or a pinned tweet or hint where you might find out more about them, their organization, and even their contact info.
You can also use the contact scraping tools to gather contact info from Twitter users, as described in strategies #3 and #4.
Articles to Explore for Getting Contact Info from Twitter Users and Prospects
- Generate Leads On Twitter
- How to scrape Twitter
- How to Automatically Grow Your Twitter Audience?
- Marketers complete guide to Twitter leads with Awario
- Twitter for Lead Generation: 19 Clever Ways to Explode Your List
- Get Emails from any Social Media
3. Leverage Lead Generation Tools
There are newer and better prospecting tools all the time, including tools you can use to generate a list of prospects that mean specific search criteria.
For many of these tools, you enter the details about the prospects you want to find (such as job title, industry, location, etc.), and then it spits out a spreadsheet with your list of prospects.
Other tools take one bit of information about a prospect (such as a Twitter profile link, LinkedIn profile, website URL, etc.), and it scrapes public online information to find their email and contact info.
Here are several of these types of tools that would be worth checking out:
- Hunter.io.
- Aero leads
- FindThatLead
- Skrapp
- Prospect.io
- VoilaNorbert
- Snov.io
- RocketReach
- Lusha
- RocketReach
- Seamless.ai
- Apollo.io
- ZoomInfo
- Clearbit Enrichment
- UpLead
4. Contact Scraping Tools
Tap more fully into your existing network by using contact scraping tools which generate a list of prospects with contact info from people you are already connected with in some way. You can do this for everyone you are connected with on Linkedin, that you’ve ever sent an email to, or from a list of websites you need the associated contact info for.
Here are some articles that show you how to do each of these:
- How to Export LinkedIn Contacts (& What to Do With Them)
- Export connections from LinkedIn
- How to Export Your Gmail Contacts
- Bulk Email Finder
5. Job Listing Sites & Contractor Marketplaces
Job listing sites (such as Zip Recruiter or Indeed) and contractor marketplaces (like Upwork or Guru) can also be amazing sources of prospects for you and your sales team. When companies create job listings, they describe their needs and problems, so you can use these listings to indicate that the company has the needs/problems that your offering addresses.
In some cases, you will be able to directly identify people who are looking for a solution like yours. In other cases, you might identify a proxy for a likely good prospect and find more success using a more indirect approach.
15 Job Listing Sites (To Start With)
- Glassdoor
- Monster
- CareerBuilder
- Zip Recruiter
- Indeed
- Simply Hired
- Ladders
- AngelList
- Getwork
- Scouted
- Snagajob
- Find.jobs
- Startupers
- Jobxoom
15 Contractor Marketplaces (To Start With)
- Upwork
- Guru
- Flexjobs
- Solidgigs
- Hubstaff Talent
- Truelancer
- Codeable
- Freelancer.com
- Fiverr
- PeoplePerHour
- CloudPeeps
- DesignCrowd
- ProBlogger
- Outsourcely
- Toptal
The degree of success you find with this approach will vary somewhat based on your industry and value proposition. For some companies, this approach can work so well it provides the majority of their prospects, and for others, it’s a helpful supplement to other prospecting strategies. But give it a shot – it works when it works!
Read Also:- Strategies for Scaling Your Sales and Marketing Process
6. Quora
Another approach to prospecting is the forum / Q&A approach. A great platform for this prospecting strategy is Quora, where anyone can ask questions on various topics.
The main approach:
- Follow a variety of channels related to your offering and target market
- Browse the types of questions people are asking
- Identify questions that are commonly asked that you could answer helpfully in a way that organically leads people to check out your website (never a direct sales pitch)
- Ideally, a template can be created for answering a set of these common questions, which will pop up from time to time, that your salespeople can modify and then post
If you’d like to download our Quora marketing example SOP, you can do so here:
Quora marketing/growth hacking SOP
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Any solid prospecting strategy needs a variety of sources of new prospects. Which sales prospecting techniques will you try out in your business first?
