How to Prospect and Get Referrals

Prospecting often makes businesspeople break out in a cold sweat. It has been harder than ever in recent years to get referrals and prospects to potential customers. In order to successfully prospect to clients, salespeople and sales managers have to learn new techniques and new tactics in order to grab the attention of consumers and turn them into your clients.

How Prospecting Has Changed

Prospecting has changed a lot in the last few years, and it continues to get harder and harder. One of the things that makes it so hard is that we are constantly being exposed to messages. Consumers are being hit with marketing overload. It’s estimated that the average person is exposed to 10,000 marketing and branding messages every single day, which has made people very defensive and skeptical. Customers have defenses up to protect their time that keeps salespeople from getting through to them. From a prospecting perspective, this means it is so important to be prepared.  When you do get a connection and do get through to a client. You have a very short window to get your message across once they let down their defenses.

Don’t Contribute To The Noise

Considering the amount of marketing overload, many business professionals are exploring new ways to try and get around the overstimulation in order to try and get their message across. Unfortunately, the most common solution is to try and do even more prospecting. Send out even more marketing and branding messages. This doesn’t really solve the problem, it just contributes to it.

Categories of Prospecting

One way to get through to potential prospects is to look at these areas that are high leverage.  Mostly neglected across all sales industries, even though they produce the best results. Considering these categories is a very potent way to break through the noise of the marketing overload. Actually reach and prospect to the people that you want to buy your product. The first category is the market that you are seeking out. Figure out what your most ideal client looks like, and prospect to them. Prospecting to a broad market means more noise. When you can prospect to a specific, tailored market, it becomes much easier to get your message out there.

The second category is messaging. What we say to a customer matters a lot. It’s important that we’re saying things that count and that resonate with who we’re talking to. The other category is medium or the channels that we use in order to get new prospects. There is a huge variety of different channels, like seminars, networking events, webinars, in-person prospecting, etc. It’s by far the most successful and most powerful medium for prospecting is referrals. As a channel, it completely slaughters every other channel by a substantial amount. Its conversion rate from lead to opportunity is astronomical. One of the best ways to prospect is to ask for referrals and ask your clients to recommend you.