For many new generation salespeople, especially those born after the year 2000, prospecting for clients via the internet is a lot of work. After all, Googling and searching to try to find clients’ contact details one by one is really boring!
New times require new sales strategies. With the exponential advancement of technology, much of what was considered the latest and even futuristic may now be obsolete.
- What was prospecting like 10 years ago and what is prospecting like today?
- What is Customer Prospecting Like Today?
- What will customer prospecting be like in the future?
1 – What was prospecting like 10 years ago and what is prospecting like today?
My goal with this article is to show how the trigger works mentality of reciprocity and professionals in the sales area, both beginners and those who have been working for decades, that we must always be aware of changes and keep up with them.
Otherwise failure will be imminent.
From the phone book to the internet
If a company did not what is spam and how is it different from email marketing its information available in the yellow pages of a telephone directory, it would not exist.
After all, there was at least one telephone directory in every home with a telephone. Exactly 10 years ago, there was a migration of companies. Large portals such as Guiamais and Telelista began to emerge and make searching for contacts faster and more direct.
Being on the internet has become a matter of survival for companies and as a consequence, the large and heavy lists that took up space on the desk next to the landline phone are no longer relevant.
Companies that did not have the budget to create websites chose to only include basic information and thus ensure the minimum necessary publicity. After all, if your company is not on the internet, it does not exist.
For us salespeople, this was a real disruption. We no longer had to leaf through 1,000-page lists to find contact information for potential customers. We could simply type in the type of company and, voila, thousands of contacts would appear.
There were emails, but the number of companies that used emails frequently and mainly for business purposes was very small. Good old-fashioned phone conversations and one-on-one visits reigned supreme.
2 – What is Customer Prospecting Like Today (2020)?
What was in transition 10 years ago is now a thing of the past. Phone books are definitely dead and what seemed to be their natural evolution (directory websites) no longer exist or have lost their relevance.
Social media is all the rage and b2b reviews clients through Facebook , Instagram and Linkedin is almost an obligation.
Inbound Marketing has become so popular that every day a new “expert” appears producing e-books to collect data from potential customers. Telephones are rarely used because WhatsApp is the new trend and for many, talking to someone is a victory to be won.
Google is a great source of information and even if companies don’t want to, it is possible to find their data on the internet. The big battle is with the quality of the information found , while there is too much information, much of it is out of date and the time that was previously dedicated to searching for contact information is now invested in validation .
Knowing if the email is correct, telephone number, address, so that you can take effective action.
Read Also: 7 Tips on How to Prospect Customers by Email
3 – What will customer prospecting be like in the future?
We are privileged, we are at the very beginning of an era where data will reign supreme. Having information about behavior will be worth its weight in gold. All the technology we have available today allows us to use what we have in the past to determine our success in the future.
New technologies like Pcontrol help salespeople optimize up to 70% of the manual work. What will be common in the future is now a reality for many companies that already use contact capture and validation platforms .
So that we sales professionals are not by machines. We need to be creative and think outside the box.