How To Find Sales Prospects Who Easily Convert To Customers (21 Tips & Places)
Learn how to identify sales prospects with the highest conversion potential through 21 expert tips and valuable places to explore
Written by
Published on
Do not index
Do not index
Finding sales prospects who will convert to customers is one of the biggest challenges in B2B sales prospecting today. Finding the right leads can take hours of research, and there's no guarantee they will be interested in your offering. So, how do you get better at finding prospects? This article will reveal how to find sales prospects who easily convert to customers. You'll learn valuable tips and discover places to find the best prospects for your business.
An Aomni website technology checker can also help you achieve your goals. By identifying the tools and technologies a prospect uses, you can personalize your outreach to resonate with their needs and interests.
What is a Sales Prospect?
A sales prospect is a qualified lead. To qualify a lead, you engage with them and realize they match your ideal customer profile. At this stage, the prospect is interested in your brand but might not yet express interest in buying anything.
Every business qualifies leads differently. For example, someone downloading your report might be a strong enough case for transitioning them from a lead to a prospect, but that may not be true for another business.
Types of Sales Prospects: Who Might They Be?
There are different types of prospects, but here are some common examples:
- A lead you spoke with on the phone
- Someone who replied to an email
- Someone who clicked on a link to visit one of your channels
- Someone you spoke to at a trade show
- Someone who asked about your product on social media
Why Sales Prospects Matter
Identifying sales prospects helps businesses determine if a lead is worth pursuing as a potential customer. It often makes more sense for companies to invest sales time, effort, and finances into sales prospects, as sales prospects are more likely to become customers in the future. Many sales teams consider determining if a lead is a sales prospect the first step in the selling process.
Sales Prospects vs Sales Leads
A sales lead is a person who has shown interest in your company’s products or services. The interest is typically demonstrated by filling out a form on your website or social media page, signing up for a newsletter, or responding to outreach from your sales team. No matter how leads find their way to your sales team, they’re the first step on the journey to conversion.
What Comes First: Leads or Prospects?
A B2B sales lead comes before a prospect in the sales cycle. Understanding the distinction between leads and prospects is vital. A lead is the first step in the process. In comparison, a sales prospect is a qualified potential customer ready to engage with your sales team.
How Are Leads Generated?
B2B leads can be generated in two ways:
- Inbound
- Outbound
Inbound sales leads are generated when potential customers show interest in your business. They might complete a web form on your site, respond to your outreach, or subscribe to your social media page.
Outbound leads come from sales prospecting efforts, like using email lists to contact potentially interested parties. When a contact expresses interest and confirms their details, they become a lead. The lead is unqualified, but you’ll learn more about them over time.
How Do You Turn a Lead Into a Qualified Prospect?
The process of turning a lead into a qualified prospect begins with engagement. This usually happens through automated email campaigns, where marketing content creates interest and encourages targeted leads to enter the sales funnel.
The main objective is to learn more about sales-qualified leads, measure their interest level, and help develop a long-term relationship. Email marketing campaigns don’t necessarily create dialogue, so you must include a call to action. When a lead follows your call to action to qualify as a prospect, they’ll become sales-qualified.
What Is a Sales Prospect?
A sales prospect is a lead qualified by a sales team to match a company’s ideal customer profile. But it’s not quite that simple. There are two types of prospects: marketing prospects and sales prospects.
Marketing Prospects
Marketing prospects are contacts who might become leads—in other words, ‘prospective’ leads. An example is an email list. Before any action has been taken, all contacts are prospective leads. They will become sales-ready leads when they have confirmed their interest.
Sales Prospects
Sales prospects are different things. If B2B marketing prospects are at the very top of the channel, sales prospects are at the penultimate level. Leads become sales prospects when they are ready to engage in two-way communication with a named individual. At this stage, they will likely have demonstrated their intention to buy your product or service and be ready to discuss details. Calls to action for sales prospects will continue the conversation until a deal is reached.
Leads vs Prospects: Key Differences Explained
Understanding where each ideal customer fits into the B2B sales funnel is crucial for success. It will determine which marketing and sales approaches to use and when. This is why it’s so important to understand the difference between a lead and a prospect.
The distinction between a prospect lead and a sales lead is essential for tailored B2B lead generation and outbound communications, as you’ll need two separate sales strategies for each group. Knowing how to guide your prospective customers from leads to marketing prospects to happy customers will mean the difference between failure and success.
Aomni: Revolutionizing B2B Sales with AI-Driven Intelligence for Account-Based Strategies
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Our key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
How Aomni’s AI Technology Helps Sales Teams Overcome Performance Barriers and Achieve Career Growth
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success Managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly enhance their preparation for customer conversations, leading to the following:
- Larger deal closures
- Increased promotion opportunities
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to:
- Elevate their performance
- Close more substantial deals
- Accelerate career progression
Try Aomni Today
Our platform transforms the way B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction:
- Fully prepared
- Strategically positioned for success
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
Related Reading
How To Find Sales Prospects Who Easily Convert To Customers (13 Strategies)
1. Block Out Sales Prospecting Time
Sales prospecting is a lot like preparing for an exam. You can’t just carry your books around and hope you’ll find time to study. Instead, you must block time on your calendar to focus on the task. It’s the same with sales prospecting. Unless you make time for it, the noise of your day-to-day responsibilities will distract you, and you won’t give prospecting the attention it deserves.
Before you know it, weeks will have gone by without you doing a meaningful prospecting activity. You’ll have seen many sales leads on social media and even received a few referrals. But there’s a good chance you won’t have effectively qualified any of these leads to see if they would fit your business well. To get the best results from your prospecting efforts, align your blocks of time with the periods in which your potential customers are likely to be available. If you reach out to them, you want to give yourself the best chance of receiving an immediate response.
2. Cash In On Your Existing Network
One of the key differences between the best salespeople and the also-rans is the desire to make their network work for them. Why shouldn’t they? Once you’ve taken the time to build a strong relationship with a prospect and demonstrated that you can add real value for them, why wouldn’t you ask if you can do the same for their friends and colleagues?
It sounds so simple. And yet, an astonishing number of reps are missing out. Almost half of top-performing sales reps consistently ask for referrals from their network—every day or whenever they’re in front of a prospect.
The Power of Referrals: How Top Performers Leverage Them for Faster Sales and Higher Conversions
That proportion drops to just one-quarter among reps who aren’t top performers. Non-top performers are also far more likely to admit that they “rarely” or “never” ask for referral business. Referrals aren’t just nice to have; they are the icing of a successful deal. They’re your most reliable source of new prospects. In B2B, companies with referrals enjoy 70% higher conversion rates and 69% faster close times. So, if you’re generating referrals, you’re selling smarter.
3. Use Events To Your Advantage
In a world of programmatic ads, laser-focused social targeting, AI, and machine learning, it’s easy to dismiss event marketing as outdated. No longer relevant. Not fit for purpose. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Event marketing is still effective, particularly when it comes to B2B sales.
Four in five marketers believe that live events are critical to their company’s success, while a majority believe it is their single most effective marketing technique. One of the most significant benefits of event marketing is access to a guaranteed stream of people with similar interests.
Maximizing Event ROI: How to Identify the Best Opportunities and Stand Out to Prospects
These people could become prospects—and, eventually, paying customers. Of course, events aren’t a silver bullet. You can’t just expect to rock up to any old conference and expect prospects to meet you.
As a starting point, ask the following:
- Which events will have the highest prospects (and offer the best ROI)?
- Which sessions and network meetups should you attend at those events?
- What will your presence look like?
- Will you be speaking or operating a booth? How will you stand out from the crowd?
4. Do Your Research
Let’s say you’ve got a job interview. You know who’s on the panel. So what will you do—leave it to chance and wait to see what they’re like? Or do your research so you’ve got the best chance of understanding what they’re likely to ask you. Unless you didn’t want the job in the first place, you’d always go with option two.
The same goes for prospecting. While your initial phone call or email might be your first contact with a prospect, that doesn’t mean it’s my first opportunity to find out about them and anticipate their needs. A little research goes a long way. It can help you break the ice with your prospects, anticipate their pain points, and understand how your product can provide the solution.
5. Don’t Sell, Build Relationships
The sales process is rarely about actual selling. If you treat every contact with your prospects as a race to close the deal, you’ll end up disappointed. Arguably, more than ever, buyers are turned off by traditional sales tactics. Asked what sales reps can do to make the buying experience more positive, 61% of buyers say the rep shouldn’t be pushy. So, what should salespeople be doing?
That same study found that 69% of buyers want the sales rep to listen to their needs. It might sound basic, but you’d be shocked how many reps fail to pay attention simply. A further 61% want salespeople to provide relevant information. What can you learn from this? Building lasting relationships might seem like a luxury in the high-pressure sales environment. Still, you’re far more likely to deliver results if you demonstrate that you’re trustworthy and can offer your prospects genuine value.
6. Get Active On Q&A Forums
Expanding on the previous point, prospects want to know they can trust you. You’re worth listening to, but they don’t want to wait until you develop a relationship with them to prove you’re an expert. Buyers are busy, after all. That’s why you must find new ways to educate your audience and highlight your skill set.
One of the most effective ways to get involved is in Q&A forums. Sites like Quora and the Moz Community are good starting points, although the best sources depend on the industry in which you operate. Prospects who see you in action on forums will recognize the value you can add. By the time I speak to them, I’ll already be several steps further along the buyer journey.
7. Use Your CRM To Speed Up Research On Your Prospect
Let your customer relationship management (CRM) system do the heavy lifting by automating prospect and account research. This will save you time and give you instant access to the insights you need to connect more effectively with your prospects.
8. Personalize Your Outreach
Reach out with custom messages demonstrating a clear understanding of each prospect’s business needs and challenges. For example, you could send a video message to a potential lead to introduce yourself and briefly cover how your solution could address a specific challenge they mentioned in a recent LinkedIn article or post. The goal is to make every communication feel customized and relevant, showing you’ve done your homework.
9. Continue To Deliver Value
Keep the conversation going by offering value in every interaction. This could be by sharing industry insights and relevant articles or inviting your prospects to events that align with their interests. It’s about continuously reinforcing their positive opinion of you and subtly positioning yourself as a go-to resource in their professional network.
10. Ask For Referrals
A referral is an interpersonal recommendation between peers, businesses, or clients. If you have a strong client relationship, asking for a referral is beneficial. You can ask that person to recommend your services to others in the future or if they can connect you with someone who might also be interested in speaking with you. A person referred to you by a friend or industry colleague is often more likely to be receptive when you reach out.
11. Evaluate And Refine
Monitor and analyze the effectiveness of your outreach strategies. Adjust your approach based on what’s working and what isn’t. Pay attention to your prospects’ technologies and look for integration points to streamline their processes or enhance their existing systems. This iterative adjustment ensures your tactics remain fresh and compelling.
12. Seek Out Startups
Who needs a lot of products and solutions? Why a new business, of course! There are various platforms to help you find new startups and information on their success, but we won’t go into that here. We’re looking more at why you’d add startups to your prospect list. Startups grow, and good ones grow fast. What might have started as a single-user license could be 10 or 20 times that before you know it. The opportunities are, in some ways, endless. Also, startups don’t always immediately register in companies’ databases. When all your competitors go after the established businesses, why not go after the ones they haven’t heard of?
13. Look For Struggling Competitors
We all know the phrase ‘keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ which comes into play here. Not that we want to encourage you to think of your competitors as enemies! Keep an eye on what’s happening publicly in your competitors' worlds. By this, we mean:
- Are their customers happy?
- Are they continually getting rave reviews?
- Do they have left, right, and center advocates, or is it a different story?
Unhappy customers can be scooped up and introduced to a better option—if you’re first on the scene, you could be their savior, who can help improve everything. Sometimes, the faults aren’t with the competitors, so be mindful of whether a customer is just disgruntled or if there’s a deeper problem you could solve for them.
Related Reading
9 Best Places To Find Prospects For Your Business
1. Aomni: Unlocking Intelligent Sales with AI
Aomni is an AI agent platform designed specifically for B2B sales intelligence software. Our solution empowers enterprise and strategic account executives to execute account-based sales and marketing strategies with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Our key features include:
- AI-powered prospect and account research
- Comprehensive account mapping and planning
- Data-driven sales strategy development
- Automated call preparation
- Personalized AI agents for sales optimization
- AI chat interface for streamlined sales processes
- AI-assisted Account Based Sales/Marketing campaign execution tool
Bridging the Gap Between Preparation and Performance in Sales:
Aomni addresses critical pain points for sales managers whose Account Executives, Account Managers, and Customer Success Managers must perform better and include quotas. By leveraging our advanced AI technology, sales professionals can significantly enhance their preparation for customer conversations, leading to the following:
- Larger deal closures
- Increased promotion opportunities
For individual sales professionals, Aomni provides the tools and insights needed to:
- Elevate their performance
- Close more substantial deals
- Accelerate career progression
Transforming Customer Interactions with Advanced Preparation
Our platform transforms the way B2B sales teams operate, ensuring they enter every customer interaction:
- Fully prepared
- Strategically positioned for success
Try our sales intelligence software for free today!
2. Online Job Sites and Boards: Discover Corporate Needs Through Job Listings
Looking through job openings and listings can help you better understand an organization’s current needs. You may find insights about their business’s objectives and goals, which can help you craft a pitch for your service. For example, they provide social media listening tools, and they have an opening for social media analysts.
You can contact them and offer your services to help them with their operations. This will be a good opening to discuss your product features and how it can help them with their current challenges and business needs. Some of the online job boards and sites you can visit are:
- Glassdoor
- Monster
- SimplyHired
- Indeed
- CareerBuilder
3. Discussion Forums: Get Insights and Connect with Prospects
Online forums are suitable for professionals and business owners to mingle and network. Sites like Reddit, BizWarriors, and StartupNation Community can be great resource places for individuals who have business-related inquiries. You can leverage these sites to find information on upcoming businesses and startups and stay updated with the latest market trends. You can also join or start a conversation in the community to seek out prospective customers.
If you find a posting about a specific question related to your service, you can hop on the thread and offer your product as a solution to their problem. The only challenge is that multiple conversations can happen simultaneously, so you must know how to use keywords to narrow your search in the forum.
4. Newsletters: Use Email Subscriptions to Your Advantage
Some common forms of email marketing are newsletters and subscriptions. They usually contain new product information, updates to your services, and sales promotions and discounts that can entice your current customer base to stay with your business. At the same time, newsletters can also help grab the attention of new prospects.
Upon subscribing to your company’s emails and newsletters, you should ensure your content has a clear message that will drive them to action. Many businesses use newsletters as a way to increase clicks and visits to their website or as a medium where they announce ongoing sales and new products.
5. Live Webinars: Network and Find New Prospects Online
Out-of-town industry events and marketing conventions are ideal for any sales professional to network and find new prospects. And nowadays, many organizations and business companies leverage their online presence to reach their audience via webinars. The beauty of webinars is that they are much easier to organize than offline events, and you can get a vast audience simply by hosting your event via an online channel.
You also have more freedom to make your webinar more interactive and engaging with specific topics, videos, and live Q&A segments. At the end of the event, you can create a landing page to push prospects to action and convert them to potential customers.
6. Social Media Sites Like Twitter and Facebook: Build Your Presence and Find New Prospects
Most people are now online and spend a considerable chunk of their time surfing the web and visiting social media. Any business needs to establish a presence on popular online networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. It’s free to open your business page on these sites, and you can start connecting and reaching out to potential prospects via online posts and video content.
Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are now more business-friendly and offer great advertising packages on their platform. They can help you publish your campaign to your targeted market and attract them to your website. Likewise, these online sites can be a good place to study your prospects and learn what they are currently looking for so you can cater to your services.
7. YouTube: Create Videos to Attract and Find New Prospects
YouTube can be accessed for so much more than video and entertainment today, especially now that people prefer to consume audiovisual content. When you are creating your sales strategy for prospects, make sure always to include YouTube in the plan. This online video hosting platform can be a great avenue to share informative and educational content that will inform the audience about your services and products.
The videos posted on your channel can stay long without needing to shell out any money for promotion. People can easily find your content by searching for it on the website. You can also immediately talk to prospects via the comments and messages section. Regularly monitor their feedback and respond to them to help them learn more about your business.
8. Yelp: Leverage Business Directories to Find New Prospects
Yelp is a community and online directory where customers can research about any local business, products, and services. By setting up your business profile, looking for prospects on this website makes perfect sense. With a Yelp business listing, it will be easier for people to come across your services and discover more about what you offer.
This online site is also great for crowdsourcing customer reviews and business feedback. If a potential prospect sees that you have many positive reviews, they are likelier to check out your service and become a new customer.
9. Quora: Use Q&A Sites to Find Prospects and Build Your Reputation
Quora is a popular site where people look for answers to their questions. For any salesperson doing prospecting, this online platform is an ideal place to do research about the industry and provide answers to other people’s inquiries. You must establish credibility by offering innovative solutions and valuable insights to their questions.
Being an active member of Quora can increase your visibility, which will likely lead people to visit your profile. Your profile should have a link to your company website so people can be redirected there to learn more about your services and products.
3 Tips For Organizing And Managing Your Prospects
1. Track Your Sales Prospects
Keeping track of data related to sales prospects is essential for sales success. After determining who your sales prospects are, organize your information. For example, you should track how well each sales prospect aligns with your buyer personas and their interest in your business. This includes taking notes every time you communicate with the prospect and noting any concerns or questions they might have.
Consider using customer relationship management (CRM) software to manage and sync all this data. Keeping careful records of your prospects helps ensure that everyone on your sales team remains informed and enables you to craft more personalized follow-up messages.
2. Coordinate With Your Marketing Team
If sales and marketing departments coordinate their efforts, they might be more likely to convert their prospects into clients. Use your sales prospecting data to help marketing teams create personalized marketing strategies for individual prospects.
For example, if a group of your sales prospects has similar concerns, ask your marketing department to send this prospect group a how-to article, customer review, or video demonstration that works to address those concerns.
3. Use Workflows
Rather than constantly reaching out to sales prospects on a personal level, consider using workflows to automate some contact processes. Sales teams can set workflows to trigger based on specific actions a sales prospect takes. For example, you could create an email to be sent out automatically each time a sales prospect signs up for a free trial or promotional period.
Try Our Website Technology Checker for Free Today
The transition to an account-based sales model helps sales teams better target their efforts on high-value prospects. This strategy relies on thorough research and preparation to achieve desired outcomes.
Aomni streamlines and automates account-based sales processes, allowing teams to execute prospecting campaigns with unmatched efficiency and effectiveness. The platform’s AI agents conduct deep research on target prospects and their companies, providing sales reps with the insights needed to personalize outreach and improve engagement.
Aomni also helps sales teams organize their prospecting efforts to stay focused and aligned on reaching a shared goal. With Aomni, sales prospecting doesn’t have to be a tedious, manual process. To enhance sales performance, it can be:
- Organized
- Automated
- Insightful approach
Aomni’s AI Agents Ensure Sales Teams Are Always Prepared for Customer Conversations
Underperformance in sales often arises from a lack of preparation. Aomni helps sales teams overcome this challenge by ensuring they enter every customer conversation with the insights needed to drive the discussion forward.
The platform’s AI agents reduce the manual research burden on sales reps and automate call and meeting preparation so account executives can quickly get up to speed on target prospects before engaging in conversations. By using Aomni, sales professionals can improve their performance and better prepare for high-stakes customer interactions.
Related Reading
Written by
