Are you frustrated after spending hours researching prospects and crafting meticulous cold emails, only to hear pin-drop silence from them? Perhaps, you’re not segmenting your prospect list correctly before shooting them emails, or maybe you’re not adding enough of a personal touch to your communication. The reasons could be plenty.

According to Hunter.io’s State of Cold Email 2022 Report, 38.7% of their users claimed to have never used personalization. This statistic clearly underlines the importance of personalization and how it’s been underused in sales prospecting today. When sales reps personalize their communication with prospects, they can start conversations that are tailored to the prospects’ likes, dislikes, their public information and overall online behavior. 

This results in better, more meaningful conversations and help establish a strong rapport with prospects. In this article, we'll dive deeper into different sales prospecting methods and navigate the right techniques to help you modify your prospecting efforts for better engagement. 

What is sales prospecting?

Sales prospecting is all about creating a database of prospects you want to work with and reaching out to them. The goal here is to initiate conversations — one example is when an SDR sends a connection request to a prospect with a personalized note. If the prospect accepts the request, the note is converted into a conversation thread where the rep can continue their engagement.

Top 5 sales prospecting methods

The first step to prospecting is choosing the right sales prospecting method. Here are 5 sales prospecting methods that sales reps use to amplify their outreach:

Method 1: DISC-personality-focused prospecting

DISC-personality-focused prospecting is a sales methodology focusing on the prospect's personality traits. It helps you adjust your communication and messaging style to resonate better with the prospect’s needs. 

Four key personality traits of the DISC framework include:

• Dominance (D): Direct, persuasive, and decisive
• Influence (I): Adventurous, visionary, and outgoing
• Steadiness (S): Steady, accepting, and agreeable
• Conscientiousness (C): Objective, collected, and reserved.

To understand this better, let’s take an example of a sales rep looking to pitch a CRM solution to an I-style prospect, who is not particularly responsive. To make their message stand out, let’s say the rep adds a reference, an interesting statistic, or a funny infographic about how their tool is better than other conventional CRMs in the market. This instantly catches the fancy of the I-style prospect, and can potentially lead to a quicker response.

💡Pro tip: Use tools like Happysales AI to get to know your prospect's personality using the DISC framework.

Method 2: Cold emails

A Backlinko study stated that the average cold email response rate is 8.5%. Clearly, cold emails work. 

While generic cold emails continue sitting in the prospect's inbox, you can get the prospects to respond to your cold email if:

1. You add a layer of personalization to your cold emails.
2. You follow up with the prospects religiously. 

Besides, you need to craft a compelling cold email to increase the chances of response rate. Here are a few tips you must follow:

• Research your audience. Learn about their products and services, existing tech stack, and the ideal challenges they might be experiencing in their current workflow.
• Craft an engaging subject line. To craft an engaging subject line, emphasize the pain points, offer solutions to the prospect's problem, or highlight statistics or results.
• Personalize your email. Use your primary research, emphasize the prospect’s pain points, and use trigger events such as congratulating the prospect on receiving funding or talking about the current tools in their sales tech stack.

While this does seem easy on the surface, crafting a compelling subject line and email body is not a piece of cake. And personalizing them that’s another challenge altogether.

Fun fact: SDRs spend 2 hours every month manually crafting cold emails. 

Reps can easily let go of such tasks from their day-to-day workflows using tools like Happysales AI, which lets you write and personalize emails from scratch.

Method 3: LinkedIn outreach

LinkedIn will dominate the social media landscape in 2024, says Semrush’s Social Media Trends Report in 2024.

Naturally, LinkedIn will be the go-to option for sales reps to streamline their prospecting and outreach efforts. But the real question is, how do they use LinkedIn effectively? Here's a simple 3-step process that can make a real difference for most reps:

Step 1: Send a personalized note when sending connection requests to ICPs.

Step 2: Add meaningful comments to start the conversation. For example, your opinion on a post the prospect shared with their audience.

Step 3: Engage further by messaging them and using the same strategy as during cold emailing. Do this only after you've engaged with the prospect 3-4 times.

Method 4: Referrals

Imagine a satisfied customer going gaga for your products and services on Twitter. Your product would grab more eyeballs, leading to more curiosity around it from potential buyers. That’s what a delighted ClickUp customer did — mentioned ClickUp as one of their favorite tools.

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Leveraging referral marketing is a great opportunity to reach a wider set of leads who are brought into the funnel through word of mouth from your current customers. According to Growsurf, one of their B2C customers brought $9K in their sales pipeline within 30 days of participating in the referral marketing program. Like Growsurf’s customers, you can amplify referral prospecting to win more contacts. 

Here’s how you can do it:

• Ask for the referral right when the customer is happy after a positive experience with your product
• Keep your customers in the loop and ask them to share details about their progress and wins. If the customer is satisfied, ask them for a referral right away. 
• Keep your referral request short and sweet 

After the satisfied customers share their wins, reach out to them with a short, one-paragraph message. Something like this would work well:

Hi [Client Name],

I’m super pumped that you’ve achieved [wins/ results] using [your product name]. Do you know someone in your network who would benefit from the product too?

Once you receive a positive response from your customers, reach out to the referred prospects, explain your product’s benefits, and nudge them to try it. 

Method 5: Co-selling

Co-selling is a collaborative approach where you partner with another business or company and convert existing or new customers. There are different ways in which it works:

• You partner with another company that offers an integration with your product, for example, Asana’s integration with Jotform. This enables Jotform’s customers to use Asana.
• You partner with a brand that has worked with clients like Google, Atlassian and more. Let’s call this partner N. When N recommends you as the go-to company to their clients, you can convert more quality leads and establish credibility among N’s customers. 

Now you know the perks co-selling provides. But how to leverage co-selling effectively?

• Partner with brands that align with your company values. If you don’t partner with brands that align with your company values, it could hurt your business in the long-term. So, collaborate with companies who share the same vision as yours. For example, if transparency and communication are two of the major values of your company and the partner doesn’t clearly communicate about their expectations from the partnership, the partner is not the best fit.
• Partner with brands that have the same ICP as yours. When you partner with companies that have the same ICPs as yours, you can expand your reach and acquire their target audience.

The best sales prospecting techniques for 2024

Sure — you're hopeful to get success with your sales prospecting and outreach efforts. But you can amplify those chances of success if you understand best practices that actually yield results when leveraging different prospecting methods. 

Here are 5 sales prospecting techniques you should master: 

1. Leverage social proof

Are your cold emails or calls not getting the expected responses from prospects? A simple way to flip this situation: use social proof. Here’s how Toplyne adds a case study to their drip email campaign to increase the discovery call booking conversions.

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Below are a few best practices to include social proof in your outreach: 

• Mention the names of 2-3 recognizable companies who've used your product, and hyperlink to their case studies in your cold emails.
• Include customer reviews from your existing customers, specifically someone in the same role or industry as the prospect.

2. Use AI to prospect for the right lead

According to research by Salesforce, sales reps spend 72% of their time on non-selling activities. These activities include conducting preliminary prospect research, filtering and selecting the right leads and opportunities to go after, sending endless connection requests on LinkedIn, etc. 

Imagine flipping this situation and spending 72% or more of your time selling instead. It's possible — thanks to AI sales prospecting tools. 

With AI for sales prospecting, you can find potential buyers and their contact information within seconds. 

Here are a few ways you can use AI for prospecting:

• Train AI to define your ICP. AI can integrate with your CRM and analyze customer data. This helps identify the prospect’s pain points, buyer journey, patterns, and customer preferences — exactly what Happysales AI does. With Happysales AI, you can capture the lifecycle of potential customers and their challenges and learn about the end-to-end. 

• Find and verify prospects. AI can scan CRM data and publicly available information from sources such as blogs, websites, social media (like LinkedIn and Twitter), and news articles, and Techcrunch. You can use this data to develop your ICP and to personalize your communication with the prospects. Furthermore, you can validate the prospects’ contact information such as their LinkedIn profile, email address and mobile number. This prevents the sales reps from wasting time on invalid or outdated contact information. For instance, Happysales AI aggregates prospects’ data in real-time from different sources like LinkedIn, TechCrunch, G2, and your CRM. 

• Personalize your outreach. AI uses trigger events like the prospect's tech stack, funding and product feature announcement, etc., and personalization variables like name and location to craft relevant and precise emails.

3. Source new contact data

What if you could source datasets of dozens of companies without spending long hours finding them on LinkedIn? 

With contact management tools, you can expand your reach and get access to new leads along with their contact information, such as email addresses, phone numbers and LinkedIn profiles. 

Happysales AI provides you with the data of 650 million individuals across 20 million+ companies that you can use for prospecting. Furthermore, you can filter this contact data based on your preferences like job title, seniority, company size, and industry.

4. Leverage attention-grabbing AI icebreakers

Starting your calls with “Dear Sir/Ma’am, I'm reaching out to you because..”  doesn't work anymore. 

Prospects’ time is precious, and they don't want you to waste a minute of it. 

Enter: AI-generated icebreakers

With AI-generated icebreakers, you can generate icebreakers at lightning speed. All you have to do is feed AI with the prospect’s details.

Here’s how you can generate icebreakers using ChatGPT:

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To craft icebreakers, you'd ideally conduct primary research on the prospect. This would look something like this:

• Checking out the prospect’s company pages and products
• Going to their LinkedIn profile and finding information such as education, professional background, interests, and the kind of content they're sharing

Imagine the time you lose with this level of research (which might still not be foolproof). Instead of relying on traditional ways of crafting icebreakers, use AI tools to do the job. For instance, Happysales AI combines prospect insights like personality, market, and account insights to get accurate information on approach, messaging, and persona.

5. Use trigger events in your outreach to be relevant

Personalizing cold email messaging is not about adding the name, date and time, or location variables. It's way more than that. 

To personalize your outreach, you must conduct extensive research about the prospect and find trigger points and events that resonate with them. 

Trigger points are key points that can be used as the sales opportunity during your research. Some of these trigger points and events include:

• Job changes
• Funding announcements
• Industry events
• Social media activity
• Existing tech stack

With Happysales AI, you can use 100+ real-time intelligence sources and triggers to hyper-personalize your email. 

For instance, you’re selling project management software. So, you can find trigger points like the existing tech stack that the prospect is using. Let's say you don't find any project management tools in the prospect’s tech stack — you can reach out to them and mention the things they're missing out on in your message. 

How AI is changing prospecting?

Artificial intelligence has changed the way sales prospecting works. Traditional prospecting? Not anymore. AI takes care of manual tasks that used to take up most of your time. 

• Data cleaning and enrichment: AI data cleaning and enrichment tools amplify the primary prospect data you already have by automatically cleaning names, company names, phone numbers, and more. Additionally, they help send timely updates on prospect activity, generate company descriptions, and more, which helps create a more targeted prospecting approach.

• Account-based prospecting: AI algorithms can learn about your ideal customers, accurately score prospect accounts and tell why specific customers are a right fit. Furthermore, the AI can identify the prospect’s pain points and add relevant information for hyper-personalized messaging. 

• ICP refinement and targeting: AI can analyze the active prospects in your sales pipeline and their personality traits and finetune your ICP and buyer persona segmentation.

• Predictive lead scoring: With predictive lead scoring, you won't have to do the guesswork on which leads will likely convert. AI lead scoring collects data from various sources, such as customer interactions, historical information, and demographic details. This provides a better understanding of the leads and their potential to convert, which further helps you in prioritizing leads. 

Tweak your sales prospecting efforts with AI

Despite leveraging the 5 sales prospecting techniques we shared, sales reps can still find it hard to prospect at their org’s desired speed. The key problem that’s causing this to happen isn’t the inaccurate prospecting techniques but how sales reps are leveraging them manually in a time-consuming and cumbersome manner.

It’s time to ditch these manual ways of prospecting and leverage AI to level up your sales prospecting game. Use AI prospecting tools like HappySales AI to:

• Understand the prospect’s personality and craft targeted, hyper-relevant messaging
• Personalize communication with AI-generated icebreakers
• Get quick summaries of prospects and their companies
• Uncover the prospect’s pain points in detail

Try HappySales AI yourself to see how it can improve your sales prospecting efforts.