Business development: the 2023 guide

Commercial prospecting will allow you to increase your sales tenfold. Often misunderstood or poorly orchestrated, it can be misperceived or assimilated to SPAM whereas it allows you to have excellent results on these sales or on these new prospects while respecting limits.

We all know the telemarketers who call you 10 times a day. That’s what prospecting is all about, but there are also many other more ethical and intelligent methods.

With this article, you will know exactly what canvassing is and how to implement it effectively.

What is cold calling?

Canvassing is the process of offering a commercial good or service to a prospect without being explicitly solicited. This method allows you to discover potential prospects from a database.

There are different types of commercial canvassing such as

• telephone
• via e-mail
• physical (we will not talk about it in this article)
• by postal mail

Why do commercial canvassing ?

A company cannot live without customers. Canvassing will help you to find new customers. This activity must be an integral part of your daily business life.

Canvassing is to make your company known and make people want to know your brand and buy your offer!

The different degrees of warmth in commercial canvassing.

During the canvassing stage, you are dealing with two types of prospects: cold and hot.

Info: in reality, there are several levels of hot and cold, but we will simplify 🙂

A lead says hot is a person who has expressed an interest in your company. They know you. He knows what kind of offer or service you provide. In this case, commercial canvassing allows you to regularly remind the prospect of your offers so that he will buy from you, and not from a competitor.

A prospect cold is a person who has never shown any interest in your company. The salesperson does not know who he or she is dealing with, nor does he or she know if the person is really interested in your offer. It is very important to be interested! Don’t think that your offer will be enough to bring in customers. You have to go and get them to allow your activity to last.

Canvassing or prospecting, what is the difference?

Commercial prospecting meets the basic needs of companies. It allows to answer different objectives which are :

• Generate sales
• To diversify the sources of business
• To increase the company’s notoriety
• Increase your market share

Finally, prospecting represents all the means to find and transform leads into customers.

To achieve this, there are different tools and methods available.

This is where commercial canvassing comes into play. It is a prospecting technique to meet the objective of increasing the reputation of the company.

Commercial prospecting on the internet in 2022?

There are different ways of prospecting. One is prospecting via the Internet. But how to do it? And what are the levers? Let’s see it together.

How to prospect on the Internet?

To be as efficient as possible and optimize your efforts, we will give you some tips for prospecting on the Internet.

First of all, be sure to identify who you are targeting. This is what we call segmentation.

Don’t just look at how your competitors are doing. Focus on your persona.

Your persona is the profile of your ideal customer.

The objective of a persona is to put yourself in their shoes in order to understand their way of thinking, of behaving in order to find a solution to their problems. By finding an answer to his problems, you know how to sell your product/service.

To create your persona you need to define its characteristics:

• His/her demographic data: This will allow you to humanize your persona and to better understand the environment in which he/she evolves
  Where does the persona live? In the city or in the country? What is his age? What is their gender?
• Values, goals, life objectives: This will allow you to understand what is important to him in his personal and professional life and where your offer/service fits in.
  What are his interests, hobbies, goals (professional and personal)?
• His personal situation: This will allow you to better understand his situation and where he gets his information to know where to look for it
  Is he/she single, married? What are his sources of information ?
• His professional status: This will allow you to know at what price you can propose your offer/service
  Is he/she an employee, a contractor, a civil servant? What is his income, his sector of activity?
• Their obstacles, problems, challenges: This will allow you to know how your service/product can respond to their obstacles
  What can slow him down in his objectives?
• Their behaviors and motivations: This will allow you to know how to communicate on your product/service to encourage them to buy and not to scare them away
  What encourages them to buy and what can prevent them from buying your product/service?

Let’s take an example. We offer an online rental management tool. Who is our ideal customer?

By creating this persona, you have analyzed your target audience. You now know how to address them and where to find them. You need to get your leads to see you. So go get them!

When we want to prospect, we obviously ask ourselves the question of the website. Once again, it is your persona that will make you aware of the importance of the site or not. Here, our persona gives an importance to the website to have an answer to his questions. So we have to make sure that we offer him an optimized user experience

Inbound marketing and nurturing

Let’s go back to our rental management tool example. We have a website. Henry reads an article on our blog about property management. He then decides to visit our site.

While he is browsing, a pop-up appears. In this pop-up, he is given a guide for 5 tips to improve his rental management. He enters his e-mail.

Henry then receives his guide by e-mail. From then on, he is entered in our database.

He will receive information and tips on how to use our tool that may be of interest to him. In other words, we will nurture him for a while until he comes to us on his own.

This is called nurturing. It is a method that is part of a more global strategy called inbound marketing, which aims not to look for customers, but to make them come to us. It is a marketing strategy based ondigital channels and content production in order to attract leads in a natural way and let them make the first step. The content can be varied such as blog articles or posts on social networks, webinars,..

Advertising and landing pages

For your commercial canvassing, you can make ads on the web, that is to say the ads you see on Facebook or Instagram for example.

The advantage here is that you can directly target the people you are interested in and not wait several weeks / months to get results.

In addition, you ensure a good return on investment and you have measurable performance indicators.

To maximize the impact of your ads and attract more prospects, don’t hesitate to create landing pages.

The purpose of a landing page is to facilitate a specific action (purchase, add to cart, contact, register on a tool).

Having a landing page is essential to get results on the web! Once again, your page must respond to the problems of your persona.

Is cold calling in 2022 still effective?

What is cold calling?

Cold calling is a set of marketing actions used to contact prospects via telephone calls.

Many use it in an abusive way, which makes it a somewhat controversial method.

However, when done properly, it is a very effective method.

We interviewed an expert in the field to give us his opinion

The opinion of Guillaume Albisetti, Head of Sales

Guillaume Albisetti is Head of Sales. Understand that in terms of commercial canvassing, he knows it (very) well.

We asked him for his opinion on the use of telephone prospecting in 2022.

First of all, Guillaume reminds us that this type of prospecting is still widely used, especially in B2B. Some activities are not suitable for canvassing via LinkedIn for example because the targets are not there. Telephoning remains the best way.

However, it is a difficult activity! Customers are more and more skeptical and distrustful on the phone. You must therefore expect to receive several rejections. But, it remains a very formative exercise for the sales teams. You have to find the right way to argue, choose your words and your ice breaker well.

For Guillaume, telephone canvassing is too underestimated. It’s not something old-fashioned, it’s still a very relevant tool. For him, it’s the most effective way of converting customers. What can be most interesting is to integrate telephone canvassing into a multi-channel sales approach. By this I mean, start by sending an email, then following this email, make a phone call, etc.

How to improve your telephone prospecting?

To improve your telephone prospecting, you need to understand your lead beforehand. That’s the secret.

Find out about your lead. What do they do? What is their job? What do they do? If they are active on LinkedIn, what do they post? Find something in common between his activity and your product/service.

Your goal is to create a connection, a relationship with the customer. Be natural like when you approach someone in the street.

To do this, you must work on your text. Don’t start with a boilerplate speech, seen and seen again. I’m talking about the classic:

“Hello, I would like to contact you, I am Marion from Deux.io. We offer a training course, it could be interesting for you”.

This technique won’t work. It is not relational enough. You have to go and get the lead and show them that you know them and that’s why you know they will need your product/solution.

Instead, prefer a turn of phrase like this:

“Hello Ludovic? My name is Marion, can I bother you for a second? I saw on your LinkedIn that you were looking for a Growth training, do you have 2 minutes to talk about it
? “

Here, we talk with the prospect, we show him that we are interested in him and only in him.

Direct mail for marketing in 2022?

What is direct mail?

Let’s go back to our example of an online rental management tool. To attract leads, I can contact them by phone or email like my competitors. But I can also send a flyer, a handwritten card, a letter, a postcard,… This is what direct mail is for. It is a marketing technique consisting in sending by post a paper to promote a product, a service, a brand, an event, etc. It usually consists of a personalized message, a document presenting the product/service and sometimes a reply coupon. Its objective? It’s up to you to define it, quote, information, everything will depend on your strategy and your persona 🙂

We could, for example, propose an appointment with an expert in rental management in Henry.

Does it still work?

To be successful with your direct mail, you need a customer file to know who to contact. You might think that in this digital world, direct mail is no longer relevant. And yet, it still works very well! The main reason? It is felt as more reassuring and less intrusive than advertisements or e-mails.

A customer/prospect file is finally a list of prospects that most closely resembles your personas. (Read this)

Top 4 prospecting techniques when you start your business!

When you start your business, you can’t position yourself on all the prospecting techniques. We generally lack money and/or time. It is therefore necessary to think according to the cost/gain ratio. You lack money, but not time! So let’s think according to the most interesting methods for a small budget, but which will bring you results.

Prospecting by e-mail

Nowadays, it is quite easy to get e-mail addresses via forms or to find them on the internet (social networks in particular). The mailbox is regularly looked at which means that if you send an email, you have more chance that it will be seen. This is why e-mail prospecting is one of the most effective prospecting techniques.
But often people don’t know how to do it.

Statistics show that an expert in email prospecting can achieve:

• +80% open rate of your emails
• +20% response rate
• Several dozen meetings

Here is how to find and build ane-mail database:

Step 1: Create a file

To create an effective customer file, you need up-to-date data.
The most up-to-date database in the world is Linkedin.
Start by creating a Google Sheet (= Excel version of Google) to be able to fill in the information about your prospects / customers.

To do this, go here.

Second step: create your first list

Choose the data that you find interesting to complete your customer file.

Let’s go back to our example of a rental management tool. First of all, I would like to have basic information such as

• Last name
• First name
• Company
• Position in the company

To get this information, I will use Derrick, a data retrieval tool, allowing me to collect this information from my prospects directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Third step: enrich the data

During the 1st data extraction, we have the minimum of possible data. In order to succeed in our sales canvassing, we must have as much information as possible about our prospect!

His gender, his phone number, his education, his job description, how long he has been with the company, etc.

This is called data enrichment! This will allow the salesperson to get to know the prospect’s life better before making contact with them.

For my rental management tool, I’ll take my Derrick tool and use its enrichment function to complete my file!

Step 4: Get your emails

Once you have your enriched client file, you will extract all the emails from the document to store them in one file (another google sheet).
This is an organization that will allow you to gain efficiency in your prospecting. All your emails are in one place.

Step 5: Process the data

In this last document concerning only your emails, you must process them. There may be errors or outdated data. It is not uncommon for a person to not update his LinkedIn profile and therefore no longer work in the company he indicates on his profile.

You must sort, analyze and clean up your data.

Step six: Prepare your prospecting emails

That’s it, your e-mail addresses are processed?

You can start prospecting!

But be careful, you have to be smart about writing.

Let’s start with our example and our persona. Henry is a banker. He works a lot and receives a lot of emails. Before succeeding in making him interested in my product, I must succeed in making him want to answer my e-mails.

So I have to build it by thinking :

• Personalization: adapt all my emails to my target and its needs and show empathy.
• Segmentation: think about the structure of my email, you can for example use the AIDA model (attention, interest, desire, action).

Henry’s main goal is to find the tool that will allow him to manage his assets in the best way. Here is the email we could send:

Hello Henry,
I am {{my first name}} responsible for partnerships at {{my company}} I
noticed that you were a banker and that you participated in the last rental investment show
.

I was there too.
If you are interested in rental investment, perhaps you could have a moment to discuss it?

We have created a tool to facilitate the search and management of properties.
We could discuss it, what do you think?

You can see 4 steps

• first, we get the prospect’s attention with our first phase
• then, we put some context
• then we explain that we understand their needs
• finally, we propose to discuss it with a solution

In a sales approach, you will have to write several follow-up emails. If your prospect does not answer you directly, you will contact him again on D+2 for example. Write your other e-mails with the same strategy. Don’t stop at 1 e-mail, statistics show that the more e-mails you send, the more likely you are to get a response.

My advice: between 3 and 5 is enough 🙂

Seventh step: Integrate your e-mails in an e-mail automation tool

Obviously, you are not going to send all these e-mails manually. You will use an automation tool!

This tool allows you to automatically send all your e-mail sequences (= all the e-mails that you will send to your prospect).

For my example, I’m going to program an email sequence for Henry. I use LaGrowthMachine which is one of the best automation tools on the market.

I will then schedule a first email to be sent on D0. Then, I schedule a second email at D+4. Another one on D+8 and a last one on D+9.

I enter all this in LaGrowthMachine and schedule.

Eighth step: launch your campaign!

Once your campaign is launched, you just have to follow the evolution of your prospecting.

The SEO

SEO is the art of positioning yourself in the results of search engines and taking advantage of it to generate traffic on your website.

For this, we will use keywords. It is a word or group of words that a user will use to search on a search engine.

Henry could write: “rental management tool” “best rental management tool”.

These are words on which our target is positioned. We must therefore write content around these words to attract them to our site. This is the basis of SEO.

But be careful, you must not just write for writing. You have to think about the search intent. That is, what my prospect is really looking for. With the word “best rental management tool”, we understand that Henry is looking for which tool is the best to use. It’ s up to us to write an article on this subject or why not integrate this keyword into our website.

With SEO, you naturally attract prospects to you. Then you can offer pop-ups, forms etc. to collect data.

Word of mouth

Word-of-mouth is still the most likely lever to convert your prospects into customers. Nothing beats a recommendation from a third party.

But it is possible to gently push your customers to talk about you, for example by finding levers that allow your customers to earn as much as you do.

For example, Derrick offers free credits to users who rate derrick on the Google Store or talk about derrick on LinkedIn.

Sign up on directory sites for your business

Specialized directories are full of :

• Professional competitor
• Potential partner
• Prospect with problems

These 3 levers are interesting:

• Competitors, recognize your expertise and redirect customers to you if they don’t have the expertise or time.
• Partners, ditto
• Prospects, you don’t need to draw a picture.

And that’s it! You now have all the cards in your hand to succeed in your commercial canvassing. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.