Sales Prospecting For Business Development

Summary

This video by Patrick Dang explores essential strategies for sales prospecting in business development. He emphasizes the importance of identifying potential customers and building relationships to convert them into paying clients. Patrick explains why reaching out through methods like cold emailing, LinkedIn, and cold calling is critical in B2B sales. He highlights the need to define an ideal customer profile, tailor outreach to address their needs, and refine messaging based on feedback. By following these steps, businesses can significantly improve their sales and client engagement.

Takeaways

• 🚀 Sales prospecting is essential for success in business development, particularly in turning strangers into paying customers.
• 📢 If people don’t know who you are or what you offer, you can’t sell to them. Especially in B2B, personal interaction is key before a buying decision is made.
• 💡 Business development involves reaching out to potential customers, building relationships, and educating them about your offerings.
• 🎯 Defining your ideal customer is crucial; targeting everyone without focus can harm your outreach and diminish your email reputation.
• 📱 TikTok is a valuable advertising platform with younger audiences and cheaper ads compared to other platforms, making it appealing for certain businesses like gaming studios.
• 🤝 Business development reps help educate potential customers about new opportunities, as some might be unaware of platforms like TikTok as viable options for advertising.
• 🛠 Effective sales prospecting can be done through cold email, LinkedIn, or cold calling, with email and LinkedIn offering more scalable approaches.
• ✉️ Personalizing outreach, such as emails, to align with the prospect’s needs and pain points can greatly increase response rates.
• 🔍 Understanding your ideal customer profile and refining it through interactions improves your outreach and ultimately your sales success.
• 📈 Sales success grows through an iterative process of refining your approach based on customer feedback, meetings, and revised strategies.

Q & A

Why is sales prospecting crucial for business development?

Sales prospecting is essential because it involves reaching out to potential customers who are unaware of your product or service. Without it, you can't build awareness, trust, or relationships, making it impossible to sell or succeed in business development.

What challenges might a business development representative face when promoting a new platform like TikTok?

A business development representative might struggle with overcoming misconceptions, such as executives thinking TikTok is only for entertainment. They need to educate potential clients about the platform’s value, such as its effective advertising opportunities, younger demographic, and advanced algorithm for targeting users.

What are the three primary methods of sales prospecting mentioned in the script?

The three main methods are cold email, LinkedIn, and cold calling. These strategies help reach out to companies that are unfamiliar with your product or service and allow for scalable outreach.

How should a business development person define their ideal customer profile?

They should analyze the value their product or service offers and identify potential customers who would benefit from those values. For instance, TikTok’s advertising potential for gaming companies targeting younger demographics. This prevents wasted efforts on uninterested or unrelated prospects.

Why is it ineffective to send emails to a broad list of contacts without targeting?

Sending emails indiscriminately can lead to loss of email reputation, as many recipients may not be interested, resulting in poor engagement and eventually emails being flagged as spam. Targeted emails ensure that the message reaches those who are more likely to be interested in the product or service.

What is the significance of understanding a prospect's challenges and goals in sales prospecting?

Understanding a prospect's challenges and goals allows you to tailor your message to their specific needs, making your outreach more relevant and increasing the likelihood of a positive response. It also helps in crafting a compelling value proposition.

How does one refine their sales strategy based on customer feedback?

After initial outreach and meetings, a business development rep should use feedback from conversations to adjust the ideal customer profile and messaging strategy. This iterative process helps to better address customer pain points and improves the effectiveness of future outreach.

What are the benefits of TikTok as an advertising platform for gaming companies?

TikTok offers a large user base, relatively cheaper ads compared to other platforms, and a highly effective algorithm that targets younger audiences. This makes it a lucrative option for gaming companies looking to advertise to a younger demographic.

What should be included in a cold email to make it effective?

A cold email should include a clear value proposition, address the recipient's potential pain points, and be concise and easy to read. The goal is to quickly communicate why the recipient should consider a meeting or further conversation.

What role does educating potential customers play in business development?

Education is crucial in business development because many potential customers may not know about your product’s value or even its existence. By educating them, you build trust, demonstrate expertise, and create opportunities for collaboration and sales.

Outlines

00:00

🚀 The Importance of Sales Prospecting for Success

This paragraph emphasizes the crucial role of sales prospecting in business development. The speaker, Patrick Dang, introduces the video, promising techniques to turn strangers into customers. He highlights the necessity of watching the entire video to understand how to succeed in sales by learning effective prospecting strategies. It’s stressed that without proper prospecting, success in sales is difficult. The video begins with a call to like, subscribe, and turn on notifications before diving into the content.

05:01

💡 Why Sales Prospecting is Vital in Business Development

The paragraph explains why sales prospecting is essential for business development. Patrick illustrates how sales rely on making potential clients aware of your existence, especially in B2B sales. A personal relationship, often built through business development reps, is key to gaining trust when selling high-value products or services. He uses the example of a TikTok business development rep reaching out to gaming studios to educate them on advertising opportunities, showing how relationships drive awareness and eventually sales.

🎯 Identifying Your Ideal Customer

In this section, Patrick discusses the importance of defining your ideal customer before starting sales prospecting. He advises against spamming everyone and explains that targeted outreach is more effective. Using the TikTok example again, Patrick shows how identifying specific value propositions—such as cheaper ads or access to younger audiences—helps target the right gaming studios. The key is to align what you offer with what the prospective client values and ensure that your outreach is relevant and thoughtful.

📧 Effective Sales Prospecting Strategies: Email, LinkedIn, and Cold Calling

This paragraph outlines three main methods for sales prospecting: cold email, LinkedIn, and cold calling. Patrick highlights the scalability of cold emails and LinkedIn compared to cold calling. He advises revisiting the ideal customer profile when crafting outreach strategies, emphasizing the importance of providing value in every interaction. The effectiveness of sales prospecting lies in personalized and thoughtful communication that resonates with potential clients rather than using generic templates.

🔍 Refining Your Sales Strategy Based on Feedback

Patrick explains how to refine your sales prospecting strategy through continuous learning. Initially, outreach may be based on educated guesses about a prospect's needs, but over time, meetings and conversations will reveal deeper insights into their challenges and goals. This feedback should be used to update your ideal customer profile, allowing you to craft more effective messages that resonate with potential clients. The cycle of learning, revising, and refining helps improve response rates and ultimately boosts sales success.

📈 The Path to Sales Success: Iteration and Adaptation

In the final paragraph, Patrick wraps up by emphasizing the iterative nature of sales prospecting. He explains that as more meetings occur, you’ll gather better information about your target audience, allowing you to adjust your approach and improve outcomes. This process of refining the customer profile and targeting leads to a continuous improvement loop, resulting in higher sales. He closes the video by encouraging viewers to like, subscribe, and comment on their key takeaways.

Keywords

💡Sales Prospecting

Sales prospecting refers to the process of identifying and reaching out to potential customers to introduce them to your product or service. In the video, Patrick emphasizes that sales prospecting is crucial for turning strangers into paying customers, particularly in business development and B2B sales. It involves various strategies such as cold calling, emailing, and building relationships with prospects.

💡Business Development

Business development involves building strategic relationships and identifying opportunities for growth within a business. In the context of the video, the focus is on developing relationships with potential clients to facilitate deals, as seen with TikTok’s hypothetical scenario of building relationships with gaming studios to advertise on their platform.

💡B2B Sales

B2B (Business to Business) sales refer to the selling of products or services from one business to another, rather than to individual consumers. The video highlights how in B2B sales, building trust and having direct conversations is critical because companies often make significant financial investments that require confidence in the provider.

💡Cold Email

A cold email is an unsolicited email sent to potential clients to introduce them to a product or service. In the video, Patrick describes cold emails as one of the primary tools for sales prospecting because they allow sales reps to reach a large audience efficiently and initiate conversations with prospective clients.

💡Ideal Customer Profile

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company or individual most likely to benefit from your product or service. Patrick emphasizes the importance of defining your ICP so that your sales efforts are focused and targeted. For example, TikTok’s ICP might include gaming companies looking to advertise to a younger demographic.

💡Value Proposition

A value proposition refers to the unique benefits or value a product or service offers to its customers. In the video, Patrick explains that understanding and communicating your value proposition is crucial for effective prospecting. For instance, TikTok's value proposition could include its large user base, cheaper ad rates, and powerful algorithm.

💡Cold Calling

Cold calling involves making unsolicited phone calls to potential clients to introduce a product or service. Patrick lists cold calling as a traditional but still relevant sales prospecting method, though it requires more time compared to email or LinkedIn prospecting.

💡Trust Building

Trust building is the process of establishing credibility and confidence with potential clients, especially in high-value transactions. Patrick highlights that in B2B sales, companies need to trust the business development representative before they are willing to make significant financial commitments.

💡Customer Awareness

Customer awareness refers to how familiar potential customers are with a product, service, or brand. Patrick explains that without awareness, prospects won’t know that your solution exists. Sales prospecting helps raise this awareness by introducing your brand to potential buyers.

💡Scalability

Scalability in sales prospecting refers to the ability to increase outreach efforts efficiently without proportionally increasing time and resources. Patrick suggests that methods like cold emailing or using LinkedIn are scalable because they allow sales reps to contact many prospects at once, unlike cold calling, which is more time-consuming.

Highlights

Sales prospecting is a must for success in business development.

Business development in B2B sales often requires personal connections to build trust before big transactions.

Sales prospecting helps educate potential clients who may not know about your product or service.

Using TikTok as an example, business development reps must reach out to gaming companies to introduce them to TikTok's advertising opportunities.

Without proactive outreach, potential clients may never realize the value of a platform like TikTok for advertising.

Sales prospecting involves identifying companies that may benefit from your product and building relationships with them.

Identifying an ideal customer is critical—targeting the right prospects saves resources and increases success.

Spamming non-targeted emails can harm your reputation, making future outreach less effective.

TikTok offers value to gaming companies by providing younger audiences, cheaper ads, and a powerful targeting algorithm.

You need to align your product's value with the potential customers' needs to create a strong ideal customer profile.

The three best sales prospecting methods include cold email, LinkedIn, and cold calling.

Tailoring your messaging based on the ideal customer profile improves the effectiveness of cold emails and outreach strategies.

Templates for cold emails work better when personalized with a deep understanding of your customer's pain points and goals.

As you get feedback from prospects, you should revise your ideal customer profile to improve your outreach strategy.

Sales prospecting is a cyclical process—more meetings lead to more understanding of your customers, which leads to more effective outreach.

Transcripts

- If you wanna succeed in business development,

sales prospecting is an absolute must.

So in this video, I'm gonna show you some

of the best techniques and strategies you can use

to turn total strangers into paying customers.

And you wanna make sure you watch this video

until the end, because if you don't know

how to do this process, and you don't know

how to do sales prospecting properly,

well, it's gonna be very difficult to succeed

in any area of field in sales.

(upbeat music)

What's going on everybody. It's Patrick Dang here.

Before we get started, make sure to give this video a like,

subscribe and turn on notifications and let's get started.

All right, so the first topic we gotta cover is why exactly

is sales prospecting so important

when it comes to business development?

And here's the thing, if nobody knows who you are

or your product or services like they don't know you exist,

well, you literally cannot sell them anything.

And especially in the B2B sales world, business to business,

well, people wanna talk to another person

either over the phone or in person

before they actually make a buying decision.

So if someone wants to spend big dollars

and they want to do a business development deal,

well, they gotta talk to a business development rep.

Because when they're spending so much money

they have to feel very confident and they have to trust

the other person that whatever it is that they buy,

the big money that they're spending,

will actually bring them value.

And sales prospecting is going to be that process

of reaching out to another company,

letting them know that you exist, and then going through

the process of selling your products and services.

And for example,

let's say there's a business development person

working at the social media company, TikTok.

So TikTok, huge platform and huge opportunity

for advertisers to jump on

and advertise their products and services.

And so let's say you're working at TikTok,

you're a business development rep

and it's your job to build relationships

with gaming studios and try to get these games

to advertise their games on TikTok.

Now, a lot of gaming studios

they already do some type of advertising

but, they may not even know

that advertising is available on TikTok.

The executives at a gaming company might think,

oh, TikTok is just that place where people do those dances

and things like that.

But they may not be familiar with,

oh, actually it's a great way to reach their customers.

So a business development person at TikTok has to go out

and reach out and build business relationships

with all these different gaming studios and educate them

and make them aware of like, hey, we are open for business.

If you want to advertise your game,

you want to get the word out,

well, TikTok is another avenue that you can leverage.

So you're making people aware of what you do

and that's sales prospecting in a sense.

And once people are aware and you built that relationship

from there you can start taking them down your sales process

to see if they really want to purchase

your products and services.

Now, if there wasn't a business development person

working at TikTok,

reaching out to all these different gaming companies,

you have to ask,

how exactly what these gaming companies find TikTok?

How would they know that TikTok

is a great advertising channel

for them to market their products and services?

They absolutely wouldn't.

Because if there's no marketing available

and no one's reaching out to them,

there isn't really a way for them to get educated.

And that's what business development is all about.

You have to build relationships with people that may

or may not know who you are, and you have to make them aware

of what you want them to be aware of.

So if they are looking for advertising channels

and they're looking around, well, you might as well

make sure that they know what TikTok is

and how they can advertise on your platform.

And this applies not only to TikTok

but basically any product or service.

If people don't know who you are,

and they don't have a relationship with you,

well, they'll never know buy from you.

And that's why sales prospecting

is the process of finding these companies,

reaching out to them and building that relationship.

Now that you understand why sales prospecting

is so important, the next step of the process

is to define your ideal customer.

So no matter where you work,

if you're working in business development,

you can't just make a big list and just spam everybody

and hope and cross your fingers like, oh my God,

I hope this person takes a meeting with me.

It doesn't really work like that.

Because if you spam everybody using your email, for example,

then your email will lose its reputation.

And then you're not gonna be able to send emails anymore.

So you wanna make sure that your emails are more targeted

and you're sending emails to people that actually care

about your products and services,

or have some type of interest if you reached out to them.

So let's go back to the TikTok example.

So I'm gonna be a business development person

doing sales prospecting.

And the first question I have to ask myself is

what value does TikTok have for, let's say gaming studios

or other companies?

Well, some of the things that I can just write down

on a piece of paper real quick

is that TikTok has a lot of users.

It's a very new, not a lot of advertisers on it yet.

So that means the ads are relatively cheaper

compared to other platforms like Google and Facebook.

Cheaper ads means more profit for advertisers.

TikTok also skews for younger audiences.

For any companies, such as gaming companies

that want to target a younger demographic,

well, TikTok might be the perfect place.

Not only that, but TikTok has a crazy algorithm

or super efficient algorithm

that's able to understand the user,

understand what they want and really just keep them engaged.

So obviously with that technology, the advertising

is gonna be a lot more targeted and more effective.

So any company who are looking for these things

in an advertising platform,

well, TikTok might be a good choice to explore.

So now that you understand the value that your product

and service has, you got to dive a little deeper

and understand who exactly would value these things.

So it can be, let's say gaming companies

that already advertise on Facebook,

but they wanna find another source to run advertising.

So those companies would be maybe a good fit for TikTok

or it could be gaming companies

that want to go for a younger audience or gaming companies

that wanna run ads across the world in Asia

and in the Western markets.

'Cause TikTok does have audiences in both sides.

So essentially you can come up

with a lot of different reasons

for why someone would value your proposition.

And you wanna basically align what you offer

with what the company or your prospects already want

and connect the two.

And that's kinda how you get

a feeling of your ideal customer profile.

And once you understand who should reach out to

and why they should even respond to you,

the next step of the process is actually

starting to do your sales prospecting

and executing all these strategists.

So the three main ways to do sales prospecting

and business development is either cold email,

LinkedIn or cold calling.

This is typically three best ones that I found

when it comes to reaching out to companies

that really don't know who you are.

And obviously using LinkedIn and cold email

is a lot more scalable because

you don't have to pick up the phone and dial every company,

you can actually just send, let's say 20 emails at a time

or 100 emails at a time.

And then start generating meetings like that.

And within your prospecting strategies

whether it's cold email, LinkedIn or cold calling,

what you wanna do is you wanna revisit

your ideal customer profile strategy.

So what value do you offer?

What pains do you solve

or why should they even want to respond to you?

And so when, let's say you're writing an email,

you wanna put all that information within the email

and make it concise and very clear

and make it a very easy to read

so that people understand the value.

And at the end when they really finish reading the email

they can decide whether or not to take a meeting with you.

So that's why it's very important

to get your strategy side down.

It's not about just using a cold email template

you find online and then hoping that it's gonna work.

It's not gonna work

because you don't know who you're going after.

So once you understand who is it you're going after

and why they should respond to you,

incorporate those elements

into whatever cold email template you want.

And then your success rate is going to be a lot higher.

Typically when people, let's say copy a cold email template

or maybe they watch one of my videos

and they're like, oh, I'm gonna use

the template Patrick recommended.

The templates do work.

But the problem is that people

aren't really thinking too deeply

about why people should respond

and they're not putting enough work

into creating their ideal customer profile.

If you've got the ideal customer profile right,

everything else becomes easy.

But if you've got it wrong, well it doesn't matter

how good you are writing cold email,

if you're writing it to the wrong person

or you're not creating the right value proposition.

Now in the beginning when you are doing

any type of outreach,

essentially you're kinda doing research online

and you are guessing what their pains are

and what their challenges are

and seeing if you can solve it.

So in the beginning, it's an educated guess.

But as people start taking meetings and you talk to them

over the phone, you start really having a conversation.

You start understanding, what exactly is their problem?

What are they really trying to do?

Or what is their goals.

And then from there, you take that information,

revise your ideal customer profile

and then redo the strategy

when it comes to what you're actually writing in the email

to make it more potent.

And what I mean by that is make it hit more nerves.

I make people really, really feel it

when you're writing that code email

so that they actually are more prompted to respond.

And the more you understand your customer,

the more people will respond.

The more people respond to more meetings you get.

More meeting you get the more sales you get.

And the more sales you get, the more information you have

on who you should be targeting.

And you kinda just kind of repeat that cycle

until you really target who you're really going after.

And then from there, your sales would just skyrocket.

And so with that said, that is going to be

the sales prospecting strategy

when it comes to business development.

If you enjoyed this video, make sure to go ahead

and give it a like, subscribe and turn on notifications.

If you want to see more videos like this,

and let me know in the comments, what was your number one

takeaway that you got from this video?

And with that said, my name is Patrick Dang.

And I'm gonna see you guys in the next one.