Sales Prospecting For Business Development

- 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.