Prospecting Methods to Bring Buyers from the Dark Side

5 Sales Prospecting Methods to Bring Buyers Back from the Dark Side

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Are your sales reps struggling to reconnect with non-responsive prospects?

They are not alone. Like many people in sales I also have faced this common dilemma:

A qualified prospective buyer completely fell off the grid. But since I was already involved in conversations and the prospect showed an interest in working with Vengreso, I wasn’t willing to let them go easily. In this article and the video below, you’ll learn about prospecting methods your sales reps can use to bring their buyers back from the dark side.

Start with the Human Factor

Sellers must first consider the potential of non-business factors affecting their buyer’s non-response. It’s possible the primary point of contact has other priorities – whether work related or family related.

While it may not be easy to learn this information, this does place high importance on your sellers having multiple contacts on the buying committee. Another member of the buying committee may reveal something like “Susan has shifted her priorities for non work related reasons and now Alan is heading up this project.”

What do you do when a hot lead goes dark or suddenly stops replying to your messages? @BernieBorges and @M_3Jr answer. #DigitalProspecting #SocialSelling #DigitalSelling Click To Tweet

Two Prospecting Methods to Get a Silent Prospect Talking Again

1. Socially surround your prospects

One effective digital selling prospecting technique sellers can do when a lead is non-responsive is to surround them socially.

There are 6.8 average buyers inside each opportunity so sellers should identify and connect with all those buyers who influence the decision. Sellers can even take it a step further and (selectively) ask executives in your company to connect with the executives at the target account, so there is a robust impact when socially surrounding the individuals on the buying committee, including the one who has gone dark.

2. Share valuable content with them

Another way to rekindle communication is to reach out and share a piece of helpful, problem-solving content. Teach your reps to use InMail, email, text, Twitter, video messaging or any other form of contact that the buyer will recognize as useful. This is especially true in the current selling environment where buyers are remote and they’re all-in on digital communication.

Their value-based messaging may elicit a response and validate their continued interest, helping to confirm that they’re still a qualified buyer in the sales pipeline. In the example in the video, the buyer was very appreciative and let me know he was interested. He was just very busy.

My suggestion for sellers is staying in contact and sending a piece of content with some regularity spaced apart by a few weeks to “stay in touch in a relevant way.” Sellers need to use their judgement on the timing. More or less frequency may be warranted based on interaction with the contact and other members of the buying committee.

Here are 5 prospecting methods to get a silent prospect talking again. @M_3Jr @BernieBorges #DigitalProspecting #SocialSales #DigitalSales Click To Tweet

Two Extra Tips for Resurrecting Dead Leads

There are many more digital prospecting methods that can help sellers reignite conversations with silent sales prospects. Two that may be new to you are the following.

3. Sales prospecting with video

At Vengreso, we teach sellers how to use sales video messages to connect with prospects through video platforms such as OneMob.

Sending personalized video messages instead of the usual plain text emails will enable your sellers stand out from the crowd and elicit a response from the prospect. That was the case with one of our clients, who was able to turn cold leads into warm leads using video.

4. Prospecting with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Chances are your sellers have dozens or even hundreds of dead leads in your CRM. Segmenting and manually sending personalized sales messages to all those sales leads may not be practical or even feasible.

That’s where AI comes in. Here’s how it works:

  • Your Marketing team (or the AI assistant) identifies prospects who have not been active with your company for a period of time, example 6 months or more.
  • AI powered assistants are deployed to message this group of people.
  • These AI sales assistants will engage automatically with these prospects through email and/or SMS, referencing previous communications to intelligently empathize with them and targeting their pain points.
  • These AI sales assistants can also assign a lead score and segment prospects into different groups, automatically updating your CRM and going through large databases very fast.

After segmenting the dead prospects, sellers can use AI sales assistants to automate and personalize headlines, email subject lines, images, email copy, colors, CTAs and time of delivery.

Are qualified prospective buyers falling off the grid of your #sellers? @bernieborges shares 5 methods to bring them back from the dark side. Click To Tweet

Bonus Tip #5

This tip s a variation on the first tip, socially surround your prospect. Perhaps you don’t know or at least are not aware of any mutual connections in the prospect’s company. You can use LinkedIn to identify who in your network works at the target company.

All you need to do is go to the prospect’s LinkedIn Profile and scroll down a little. Just under the LinkedIn headline, you will find the Highlights section with the number of mutual connections. Click on the ‘mutual connections’ text and go through the list. Once you identify a suitable contact who may be a bridge to the prospect, contact them to ask for help.

Remember that the goal is to get a response from the prospect, since he or she has become unresponsive.

In the following video, Vengreso’s CEO, Mario Martinez Jr., provides some great tips on how to ask for a digital referral. These tips will be useful when trying to reconnect with a cold prospect through a mutual connection.

Are you Ready to Master Sales Prospecting?

I hope these tips are useful for your sales team. Our mission at Vengreso is to help sellers find, engage and connect with prospects to create more sales conversations. We teach them social selling skills, how to leverage video, and how to sell with LinkedIn®.

Click the image below to find out about a digital sales prospecting method we have developed.

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