Keeping the top of your pipeline full - regardless of the day of the month and how full the middle of the pipeline is - is crucial to continued, predictable success as a sales professional. It's also a pain.
With 40% of sales professionals saying prospecting is the hardest part of their job, you're not alone.
And as you're intimately aware, it's hard to focus on the continued pursuit of cold leads when you have warm ones on the verge of signing on with you.
You also are more familiar than you'd like to be with the feeling of the end of the quarter coming up... and being a little short of quota.
That's not the best time to be starting your outreach - Gong Research found that average salespeople made far more calls in the last month of the quarter than the first two. And the success rate of those “eleventh hour” calls? They tended to be lower than any other month.
You can do better.
Today, we've created a step-by-step guide to help you get better at prospecting without having to manage it so meticulously yourself.
1. Use more templates
You're not the first person to write a sales email. So why would you start from ground zero? Take a look at how other professionals are using proven templates, then iterate on them to further improve.
We like these ones from The Muse, Hubspot, and Fit Small Business.
2. Use automation
If you're not using email scraping tools, you're missing out on some fantastic opportunities. With a little effort, you can find almost anyone's email.
Additionally, it is pretty simple to manage automatic email follow up in your pipeline, making sure you don't miss an opportunity because of a failure to follow up.
3. Use AI tools
AI tools like Clara arehere to make your life easier. While none of them can take the place of a real life assistant (yet), they can give you a serious leg up while you're trying to get your systems into shape.
Use these to start taking notes during calls, help with scheduling, and more.
4. Get help
One of the top ways Prialto sales assistants are utilized continues to be in a sales development role, where they are handling prospecting and follow up based on the sales system you have developed. (Alternatively, we can collaboratively co-create one with you based on our best practices using the tools we mentioned above.)
Related: Not Your Daddy's Sales Team
What You Should Do Now
If you need help with sales support, here are a few options to help you:
- Download our eBook "Spend More Time Selling with a Virtual Assistant" and get a better understanding of how a virtual assistant can handle tedious sales tasks to give sales leaders and teams more time to sell and take care of customers.
- Book a free consultation call with Prialto. We can help you regain more of your time to sell by offloading repeatable tasks to a fully managed virtual assistant. One of our experts will help you create a plan to delegate your tasks and we will even train your sales assistant for you.
- If you know someone else who’d benefit from sales support, share this post with them via email, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.