Running a small business without a self service prospecting tool is like doing your year-end finances without Excel. We found out the hard way when our first Startup failed. That’s why we’ve created Prelo, to help growing businesses find sales qualified leads without breaking the bank. 💳

40% of Salespeople say that prospecting is the most difficult part of the sales process.

In this blog we are going to give you the breakdown on how Prelo can help you discover qualified leads and grow your agency. 🚀

If you want to work with Startups then you’ve come to the right place. If you’re already working with Startups then you know how difficult it is to find well-funded ones.

Our self service prospecting tool helps you qualify and categorize Startups so that you can focus on accelerating your outreach.

What is a Self-Service Prospecting Tool?

Let’s start by defining Sales Prospecting.

Sales Prospecting is a fundamental business activity for many companies. It’s the process of finding potential customers and converting them into paying customers.

Since prospecting is so time consuming, it is of no surprise that many medium sized companies outsource this activity.

For small businesses however, the story is very different. Budget spend on a marketing person is a deciding factor. As a result, prospecting as a business process for small businesses is often undertaken by the business owner.

This is where a self service prospecting tool like Prelo comes in handy. Prelo is a frictionless prospecting tool to help small business owners find qualified leads they can turn into paying customers.

Every small business owner wants a simple but effective prospecting tool to scale their outreach, and the answer to this problem is a self service prospecting tool.

 

Setting up Prelo as your Self Service Prospecting Tool

Are you running a consulting business or a digital agency? If the answer is yes, then you should be looking to work with Startups, especially funded Startups.

I’m going to share the insights that will help you get ahead of your competitors and get you working with funded Startups using Prelo. We are going to go through 4 main steps:

1. How to setup your account on Prelo
2. Start discovering sales leads
3. Add notes to a sales lead
4. Export your sales leads into a csv

 

1. How to setup your account on Prelo

Setting up your Prelo account is easy. We’ve created a simple onboarding process and it takes just a few minutes to fill in your details.

2. Start discovering sales leads

With Prelo, you can easily generate qualified leads by uploading your company profile and contact details. Once you complete the registration, we’ll search through our database of more than one million handpicked key decision makers and 250,000 funded Startups to match them up with your requirements.

3. Add notes to a sales lead

You can also add notes to each company so you can keep track of what you need to do next. This helps you stay organized and focused when you follow up with prospects.

4. How to export your sales leads

Once you’ve added all your contacts into the saved prospects list, you can export them into an excel file or csv file.

If you choose to export into an excel file, you can then import the data back into your CRM platform. Many small businesses are using HubSpot and Close to do this. We’ve partnered with Close so that you can send your saved prospects straight into your email list.

5. How to start email prospecting with Prelo

Apart from being able to download sales leads into your CRM, Prelo also has the functionality that allows you to craft your first emails to a handful of prospects.

With over 150 email templates, Prelo allows you to add your saved prospects directly to a specific template and generate personalized email outreach messaged

Executing a Sales Strategy with your Self Service Prospecting Tool

I’m going to share our approach to sales prospecting at Prelo. It’s not complicated at all; in fact, it’s been put together as a self-service prospecting resource.

I’ve done this because my approach has been, “do it yourself, so that when you hire someone you have a baseline for what you are looking for”. Let’s get started and help you execute a strategy that’ll turn your leads into paying customers

Timebox your sales prospecting activities

Set time aside for the different aspects of your B2B sales prospecting activities. Start by building your ideal customer persona and finish with running your marketing outreach campaign.

Some founders and CEOs prefer to work on their prospecting activities for one week and then take then following week off. If you have a self service prospecting tool like Prelo you can literally engage in sales prospecting activities every week!

There are some days of the week which are immovable. For example, research has shown that the best days of the week to send outreach emails are Tuesdays and Thursdays. So, we make sure to optimize our strategy to send outreach campaigns on these days

Build an ideal customer profile / customer persona

Building an ideal customer profile is one of the most analytical and somewhat scientific activities you’d have to take whilst executing your sales strategy. Since we are targeting Startups, Prelo is the right self service prospecting tool to help you.

When selling to Startups, items like Age, Interests, Education and Gender don’t matter so much because your engagement with a Startup is a B2B Sales engagement.

For this you, need to know their

• Funding Amount
• Industry
• Size of Company
• Hiring Trajectory
• Key decision makers.

Since most funded Startups have a presence on social media you can switch between Twitter and LinkedIn to find out all the information you need over a few days.

On the other hand, you can go straight to Prelo and find out all the information in a couple of seconds.

Note: always open the door to serendipity, just because they don’t fit your customer persona doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a casual conversation.

Segment your target audience

Audience segmentation is the secret sauce that’ll help you scale your outreach and improve your sales conversion as an agency owner or a consulting firm.

We have used Prelo to segment our target audience so that we are in a better position to create super personalized outreach messages.

We run a Startup too, so we are your ideal customer. I share this because we see what does not work and we want to share what really works.

Initial segmentation for Startups must focus on 3 key attributes.

1. Company Size – how big they are 11 – 200 employees
2. Company Budget – how much funding was raised $500k – $100m
3. Company Industry – what industry do they operate in FinTech, HealthTech, MarTech

A segmentation of 11 – 50 , 50 – 100, 100 – 200 is a simple but effective segmentation that can help determine how you approach the Startup.

The rule is, the smaller they are the easier it is to connect with a decision maker on LinkedIn. If they are in the 100 – 200 size, typically there is a layer of management.

Whilst these individuals may not have buying authority, they have buying influence. Buying influence means they will help you get in front of the key decision makers.

Similarly, the size of the funding they secured from investors and the industry they operate in will help in further optimizing the audience segments for higher conversions.

Create a warm list of leads using a Self Service Prospecting Tool like Prelo

Once you’ve finished with customer segmentation, the next activity required to execute your sales strategy is to create a golden list of warm leads.

These are the individuals that are not quite ready to buy. They are individuals that have expressed an interest or that you have reached out to in the past and they’ve shown an interest.

These prospects require further qualification.

Build a presence on social media

If you are not on social media, you need to be. Head over to Twitter, (it’s much better these days). You could also try LinkedIn. Social media is where you “break bread” with Startups.

1️⃣ LinkedIn – Seed and Series A plus funded Startups
2️⃣ Twitter – Pre-Seed and Seed funded Startups

78% of business owners engaged on social media are outselling their peers who aren’t. Prelo is your self service prospecting tool that helps you target the Startups you should “break bread” with first!

Connect with your prospects and learn more about them, so that your outreach message really feels personal when you send it. It’s not about sending 1000s of emails and getting back a couple of responses.

I’ve written a few blogs about social selling and social prospecting, but this less about selling and more about creating a presence on social media.

Build your personal brand as the owner of your business and allow your prospects to connect with you and check out your posts before they make a purchase.

Start your campaign with a self service prospecting tool

Starting your sales prospecting campaign sounds simple, but there are at least 3 steps to this process.

1. Initial outreach to sales prospects
2. Craft a compelling first email with templates from Prelo
3. Care about your customer by sharing highly relevant content
4. Nurture your sales prospects and follow up with your offer

Remember it takes about 8 touchpoints to close most sales 🚀

Tired of pitching to Startups with zero budget?

👉 Try Prelo

Prelo connects growing businesses to recently funded Startups in 3-Clicks

👉 Get Started For Free

💡 Access over 1 million highly curated decision makers from well funded Startups

😲 Discover Emails and Business Contacts in seconds

🎯 Send super targeted emails to well-funded Startups and 10x your revenue

Until the next time.

Olu
Founder, Prelo
I tweet about helping founders win!