The Most Common Prospecting Mistakes

The Most Common Prospecting Mistakes

Good prospecting can be the difference between blowing past your numbers and not making a profit. It’s the foundation that sales and marketing teams use to build up the rest of their go-to-market motion. Unfortunately, many organizations are plagued by poor prospecting without even realizing the core issue they face.

By prospecting, sales and marketing organizations figure out who to target. When they prospect poorly, otherwise valid sales strategies can fall completely flat. Unfortunately, much of the prospecting process is often left to inexperienced and insufficiently-trained sales representatives who poison the well of a sales motion before it can even begin.

 

what's prospecting

 

What Is Prospecting?

Prospecting is the process of identifying people with buying personas. It’s the foundation for most sales and marketing campaigns, used to determine who to target and how to categorize them.

Companies use prospecting to create lists of people for cold calling, advertising campaigns, and even event invitations. It’s at the root of any sales or marketing motion and can look different between these varied applications. But the core remains the same across all of these applications: sales and marketing professionals search for their ideal customers, people who they believe could want the product they’re selling and have the resources to buy it.

 

Common Prospecting Mistakes

Relying on Junior Employees

Many companies leave prospecting to their lowest-level sales representatives, like SDRs or BDRs. They cycle through these reps quickly, so that the salespeople don’t have the sales experience or product familiarity to effectively identify their target audience. An inexperienced rep might think that a company looks like a good fit or a certain prospect looks like a decision-maker, when in fact it’s the wrong person at the wrong company.

prospecting-mistakes

 

Poor Training

Few sales teams spend enough time training their employees on proper prospecting. Instead, they write elaborate call scripts, write battle cards for their matchups against every competitor, and prepare positioning briefs that only briefly mention their target audience. Without intentional, deliberate training in prospecting, even experienced reps can repeat bad habits and fail to prospect correctly.

Automated Prospecting

Some executives think that they can automate their prospecting issues away, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, automated prospecting through expensive enterprise tools introduces new issues into an established process. Even the best tools on the market have frequent errors that an experienced salesperson would never make, from old or incorrect job titles to poor industry segmentation.

 

How to Prospect Well

There are a few important tricks to avoiding these common mistakes when prospecting. By relying on manual prospecting instead of automated programs, holding sales reps accountable for proper prospecting, and supporting them with the training they need to succeed, companies can quickly overcome all of these common prospecting problems.

Another way to quickly and reliably prospect without these issues is with an outsourced prospecting team. At Salaria, we retain seasoned professionals to specialize in quality prospecting and connect you to your next customers’ key decision-makers. Check it out here and feel free to contact us for more information.

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Google Reviews

Patricia McLoughlin
Patricia McLoughlin
2023-03-30
We have used Salaria for over two years and the experience has been great. They are hands down the best B2B prospecting agency I have used (and I’ve used many over the years!) I’ve seen them deliver consistent, quality results over a long period of time. We have even referred partners to them that have also been pleased with Salaria’s performance. They are very proactive when it comes to trying new strategies and do a great job managing engagement data - both inside and outside our system. Overall, I would highly recommend Salaria to anyone looking for an outbound prospecting agency that can deliver results and a positive ROI - regardless of the market you operate in!
Kyle Miller
Kyle Miller
2023-03-17
Salaria has done a great job increasing the total amount of prospective leads for our company. Elizabeth and her team are very professional and the amount of calls they crank out with just a few people is remarkable! We value the collaborative process, and the open line of communication makes it easy to adjust strategies on the move without any down time. The weekly reports & dashboards they provide are a very nice touch. Overall a great experience with an honest and hard-working company who's motivated to help us grow our sales.
Aviva Fridman
Aviva Fridman
2023-02-01
Salaria is amazing! I have spoken with several companies like Salaria, but I have found them to be mostly talk. Salaria does exactly what they say they are going to do - they get meetings! I greatly appreciated that even though we had a slow start, they came in an worked hard to earn regain our trust. They are always tweaking and improving their process to make sure they are meeting our needs.
Matt Shreibman
Matt Shreibman
2022-11-28
As someone who has been in medical device sales for 10 years now, I highly recommend Salaria to anyone who is looking for more targets. Pipeline is the life blood for any sales organization and Salaria is a great resource to have.
Nick Lassor
Nick Lassor
2022-07-20
Salaria has been a game changer for us! We have tried various companies and internal processes to manage a rather difficult lead gen process and they have performed way better than we expected. They adapt to our feedback. They provide clear information. They are always looking for ways to improve. If you are on the fence, just pull the trigger. Salaria will do everything they say and more!
Jason Gonos
Jason Gonos
2022-07-14
Great company and great people. I am super impressed with our director of account management LP and his team. I have been with them for about 4 months and just signed for a 6 month extension. I have been getting TOO MANY HIGH QUALITY LEADS to manage and am now forced to build out my sales team because of Salaria :) Highly recommended. The cost will pay for itseld quickly.
James Hoover
James Hoover
2022-04-06
Salaria has been a huge boost to our lead generation efforts. They are able to create meetings with high level executives who are vetted properly. Great company to work with.
Nilesh Surana
Nilesh Surana
2021-12-16
We started working with Salaria about 10 months ago and they have been able to generate about 60-70 meetings of which 4 deals have closed. I was a bit skeptical before deciding to work with them because I didn’t know if we could effectively outsource part of our sales development strategy. I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how well things have gone. We’ve also seen an improvement in conversion rates across the whole team because we started using a lot of the scripts and templates Salaria was using. I have to admit that they've been impressive with how helpful they’ve been from a strategy perspective. Highly recommend these guys!
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