Missed it? Our recap of the webinar on the best tips for identifying sales opportunities is here.
During this 30-minute session, Sophie Panot, Webmecanik’s Marketing and Sales Director, helped all participants (re)adopt the right habits to become a high-performing salesperson.
What does identifying sales opportunities mean?
Every good salesperson remembers how important it is to classify opportunities according to their level of maturity: cold, warm, hot, notably thanks to the BANT method: B for Budget, A for Authority, N for Need, and T for Timing. This preliminary step before any outreach is absolutely essential to build a connection and ultimately lead to a conversion.
A few figures:
During this session, Sophie Panot also reminded us of a few figures that explain the challenges faced by salespeople and their use of a CRM. Two key figures caught the participants’ attention:
➡️80% of sales teams use a CRM, 46% of marketing departments & 45% of customer service departments.
(Source: Capterra)
➡️92% of companies say that their future priority is to generate leads and focus on customer experience. (Source: Super Office)
The 7 everyday best practices for identifying your opportunities
Really knowing your prospects, knowing how to identify opportunities, having the right tools to perform… It’s time to go back step by step through the practices you shouldn’t have missed.
Social media are your friends
To perform professionally, use social media to your advantage! It is not (just) a pastime but truly a work tool. Being active on LinkedIn, Twitter, and in Facebook groups is useful for taking the pulse of customers or future customers and getting in touch with them subtly. Use hashtags and target your prospects according to their interests. A good way to break the ice!
Events
There are three ways to use events to identify sales opportunities:
- By attending them: review the physical trade shows in your industry and determine whether you can network on site to build your brand awareness and your prospect portfolio
- By organizing them: you have to get started and begin with a small event at first, just to see what effect it has and whether it is worth investing more or doing it regularly
- Create webinars regularly! It is the most effective way to gain visibility and enrich your contact database for minimal investment. You can also invite brands targeting the same prospects as you to these webinars to multiply your chances of identifying opportunities.
Referrals
Also known as word of mouth. Your satisfied customers are your best ambassadors. Sophie Panot advises calling your trusted contacts and asking whether they have new contacts who might be interesting for you.
Every week, you can set aside a few minutes to share contacts with people in your industry whom you trust.
Internally as well, don’t hesitate to talk with your colleagues, project managers, management, and support teams; they certainly have potential projects to share with you.
Finally, you can build a network of referral partners paid per deal brought in, which you should ideally keep informed about your latest news and challenges.
Marketing automation
By synchronizing your CRM with a marketing automation platform, you can continuously automate and qualify your contacts by analyzing their behavior. Be alerted at the right time to validate the identification of opportunities. A real time saver!
Following up with MQLs
Because creating and sending marketing automation campaigns is not enough, you need to get into the habit of following up with your prospects based on the behavior they displayed when they received your communication.
For example, Sophie Panot recommends calling the contacts who downloaded your resources.
You can also get in touch with the marketing team to obtain database extracts according to your criteria.
This follow-up on marketing actions is essential for the sales team; it helps them find new prospects and enrich their CRM.
Equipping yourself
There is no need to collect expensive or (overly) innovative tools when you are looking for efficiency and achieving your sales objectives. Webmecanik’s Marketing Director recommends equipping yourself with:
- a CRM
- a calendar
- business cards or your LinkedIn
- tools to scrape, enrich, and communicate: choose the one that suits you, not the one from your company’s group agreement…
Tracking opportunities
It is important to finish what has been started. Launching marketing operations or making contact is useful if you carry out precise follow-up. Managing and closely monitoring your follow-up activities is essential to stay relevant and not lose opportunities that would simply have needed a little nudge to convert.
Final word
Sophie Panot concludes the webinar with this final piece of advice: “Overall, show innovation in your direct approaches with prospects. Speak to them using their vocabulary, their everyday issues, and be clear about your impact.”
Did you like this webinar topic? Download our playbook on the subject and take stock of your prospecting habits.
If you prefer to watch this event, our replay is already available here.
To take action, discover our CRM here and multiply your opportunities right now.
