Six Tips To Help Your Prospecting Next Week

Six Tips To Help Your New Business Prospecting This Week

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In this post, I’m giving you six tips to help your new business prospecting this week-I hope you’re all doing OK and staying safe.

To kick things off, I’m guessing as well-intentioned as a lot of the messaging has been this past week, “uncertain times” is going to be at the top of the list of word combinations we no longer want to hear. 🙂 

All kidding aside, in the next several posts, we’re going to write about what we’re seeing in the agency new business landscape and what’s working with our prospecting efforts to help your efforts. 

Here we go. 

1) Do not slow down new business efforts out of fear of being tone-deaf  

(Some of you reading may have seen a bit of this on my LinkedIn posts, but it bears repeating. ) 

Having said that, be respectful (you should always be anyway) and think about your messaging.  

Your prospects will truly need your help to grow their business in the coming weeks & months.  

Take the time to reassure clients, prospects, & your employees-you’re doing good work for your clients now-relate that to your prospects, in a meaningful and helpful way.  

As in any crisis, there will be crappy people who try to take advantage of the situation-you should not feel this way when it comes to new business/prospecting.  

We’re already seeing agencies worry about being tone-deaf or thinking now is not the time to prospect-that is a mistake.  

You have a business to run, staff to take care of, & others in your personal life to take care of-don’t stop your new business efforts. 

2) Speaking of tone-deaf, two emails I got this week with this type of messaging: 

i. CORONAVIRUS MADE ME DO SOMETHING TOTALLY CRAZY 

ii. I know you are going through a crazy time right now with a lot of uncertainty, but you really need to pay attention to this.

Both were well-intentioned, but I would avoid this type of language. 

3) People, i.e. your prospects, are generally spending more time on social media  

This is the time to get on LinkedIn and create some content.  It doesn’t have to be full-on posts, it can be a 3-6 sentence post, but make sure it applies to your vertical or service offering, showing your clients and prospects how you’re helping while we’re all going through this. 

This video from our 3 Takeaways series will help spark some ideas. 

Six Tips To Help Your Prospecting This Week

4) More/all of us are working from home, which generally means fewer distractions for your prospects. 

I don’t mean to be crass or opportunistic, but these are potential opportunities. 

And your prospects will want some human interaction from those other than in their immediate household as well.

If you are there to show how you can help, they appear to be willing to listen. 

5) Now is the time to review your site and case studies  

Ideally, you won’t have a lot of downtime in regards to work, but realistically you probably will. 

As some others online this week have pointed out (shout out to Doug Davila at CBD), make sure your site and case studies are up to date and prospect-ready. 

We’ll be posting more on the topic, but this video should be helpful. 

6) Don’t tell your prospects what they already know 

I’ve spoken to this before, but it’s really important now. 

Speaking again to your messaging, I would avoid language like this: 

In these uncertain times, it’s never been more important for your B2B marketing strategy to. . . .  

Or some version of this.  

It’s not that it’s inherently bad, but your prospects know these are uncertain and shaky times, you don’t need to remind them.

Cut to the chase and talk about your solutions/value. 

I hope these are helpful, we’ll be writing more on each of these. 

Please do reach out if you have questions or suggestions (lee@rswus.com). 

I'm the VP of Sales at RSW/US. We specialize in working with services firms to help drive and close new business-if you need help with that, email me at lee@rswus.com. What I actually do: drive sales efforts to bring ad agencies and services firms on board with RSW, create content around successful new business tactics and help drive RSW/US marketing objectives, including social media channels, blog content, webinars, video and speaking engagements. Dig it.