Why Sales Teams Need to Find Prospects at the Right Time

When finding the right prospects, the most important aspects are:

• Timing
• Buyer personas
• Buyer’s journey

It is important for your sales teams to consider the buyer's journey from your prospect’s perspective as opposed to your own perspective.

From your perspective, it is a sales process or sales cycle, however, in a world where the buyer is holding all the cards, it is vital for you to understand the journey they go through and the active research process that leads up to a purchase decision.

The Buyer’s Journey   

In the buyer’s journey, there are three stages:

• The Awareness stage: prospects research broad-based problems
• The Consideration stage: prospects start to compare the pros and cons of different options
• The Decision stage: prospects are ready to raise their hand by scheduling a free assessment or consultation

It is critical to have content for all three of these buyer’s journey stages, and content that is relevant to each of your buyer personas.

Get Found Early

Regarding timing, you need to arrive early enough to earn trusted advisor status and influence your prospects’ decision-making criteria.

Many businesses struggle to get found early. You need to know what each of your buyer personas is trying to solve when they do searches on Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whichever search engine they use.  

You also need to know what problems they are trying to solve when they interact with colleagues on social media; this is critical and one of the primary reasons we develop buyer personas. Buyer personas prevent businesses from spinning their wheels and wasting time talking to unqualified prospects who do not fit the definition of whom they want as clients.  

Premium Content

You must have lead generation content for each buyer persona, and stage of the buyer’s journey. This type of content is often referred to as premium content or gated content because it is locked behind a landing page.

As long as the content is valuable enough in the eye of the beholder, they are typically willing to trade their business card information for access to what is on the other side of the landing page.

The higher the perceived value of the content is, the more form fields you can ask to provide. If it is a useless offer, don’t expect to get more than the prospect's first and last name and email.

For example, if you are giving someone a pdf of a book they could purchase from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, you could probably ask them for a little more information. Likewise, if they are attending a one-hour webinar, breakfast seminar, or lunch and learn, you can certainly ask for more information.

The Bottom Line

Neglecting content creation for the Awareness and Consideration stages is damaging to your sales funnel. Due to laziness, these businesses are only appealing to prospects in the final 10%-30% of the buyer’s journey.

Are you finding prospects at the right time of their buyer’s journey? Let us know in the Comments below. 

To learn more about finding ideal clients at the right time, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.