Prospecting is the work of finding potential buyers and starting conversations with them. It is also the step most salespeople avoid, because it involves a lot of rejection. The good news is that prospecting is a skill and a routine more than a talent, and both can be learned.
Start with your ideal customer profile
You can't prospect well if you're trying to sell to everyone. Write down the profile of the customers who bought fastest, paid the most and stayed longest. Typical fields:
- Industry and sub-industry
- Company size (employees or revenue)
- Location and language
- Technology they already use
- The job titles of the person who feels the problem and the person who signs
Then list the buyer personas inside those companies. A head of operations and a finance director care about different things, so they need different messages.
Look for trigger events
A trigger event is a change that makes a company more likely to buy now. Reaching out after a trigger turns a cold message into a relevant one. Good triggers include:
- A new leader in the role you sell to (new leaders often change suppliers in their first 100 days)
- Funding rounds, acquisitions or expansion into a new market
- Hiring sprees in the team you serve, visible on job boards
- A competitor's product being retired or changing price
- Regulation changes that create a deadline
Build a multi-channel sequence
One email is not prospecting. Most meetings are booked on the third to sixth touch. A simple two-week sequence looks like this:
| Day | Channel | What to send |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Short, relevant first message with one question | |
| 1 | View profile, connect without a pitch | |
| 3 | Phone | Call, leave a 20-second voicemail if no answer |
| 5 | Reply to your first email with a useful resource | |
| 8 | Phone | Call at a different time of day |
| 10 | Comment on or reply to something they posted | |
| 14 | Short "closing the loop" email |
Write messages for one persona at a time and refer to the trigger. "Saw you're hiring five new support agents" beats "I hope this email finds you well" every time.
Write messages people answer
- Keep first emails under 100 words. The goal is a reply, not a sale.
- Make it about them: their trigger, their likely problem, their goal.
- Ask one easy question, such as "Is this on your list for this quarter?", instead of asking for 30 minutes right away.
- Remove anything that sounds like a template: "touching base", "circling back", "I wanted to reach out".
See the cold email guide for full templates and the cold calling guide for phone scripts.
Protect a daily prospecting block
The salespeople with the fullest pipelines treat prospecting as a fixed appointment. Block 60 to 90 minutes every morning, close your inbox and work through a list prepared the day before. Batching the same task (research, then calls, then emails) is faster than switching between them.
Track the right numbers
Measure the conversion at each step: contacts reached, conversations, meetings booked, meetings held. If you know that 40 calls lead to 6 conversations and 2 meetings, you know exactly how many calls you need. The pipeline calculator does the math for you.
Common objections when prospecting
Early conversations are full of brush-offs. Prepare for the most common ones: