Complete glossary of B2B prospection
Cold call, multichannel, LTV, CAC... What are we even talking about?
4/8/20263 min read
B2B Setting: Can It Actually Help You Generate Customers?
There's not really any difference between setting and multichannel B2B prospecting in terms of the actions involved. The process is exactly the same.
The difference lies in the context: when I'm doing setting, I'll cold call, send a prospecting email, or reach out via LinkedIn DM to someone who has already shown some level of interest.
So, what exactly counts as a buying signal?
For example, let's say I regularly publish content on LinkedIn, and some people within my target audience visit my profile.
Even if they don't book a meeting directly through my Calendly, they're still much warmer prospects than people who don't even know who I am.
Setting is essentially about prospecting an audience that's already warm.
Obviously, this works better than completely cold prospecting. But in which situations can you really make the most of this approach?
Setting Works Best When Targeting Independent Professionals and Small Businesses
It's the same principle as when we compared the effectiveness of marketing versus B2B prospecting.
Marketing content offers the best ROI, quite simply because it's free. If it helps you generate even a single customer, the ROI is technically infinite.
However, content marketing requires a huge number of impressions to generate even one meaningful action, and you have no control over who actually sees your posts.
That's why content marketing is particularly relevant when targeting independent professionals or, at most, very small businesses. There are around 4.3 million of them in France.
So, theoretically, at least one out of every 30 impressions you generate on French LinkedIn should reach a decision-maker within your target audience.
However, if you're targeting larger SMEs, mid-sized companies or, even worse, large corporations, content marketing will struggle to generate meaningful opportunities.
Quite simply, there are far fewer relevant decision-makers within these companies.
For example, there are probably around 35,000 CFOs in France working in larger SMEs, mid-sized companies and large corporations.
If you're targeting these professionals, you'll probably need several thousand impressions just to get a single CFO to see one of your posts.
On top of that, going viral becomes much harder because your expertise is relevant to a relatively small audience compared with the entire French market.
In these situations, direct B2B prospecting will often be much more impactful.
See here for more information on how to build effective B2B prospecting lists, the first and most important step towards successful B2B prospecting.
If generating a handful of meetings among independent professionals and small businesses already requires a huge amount of content and impressions, targeting much smaller audiences will require even more time and effort.
Unless you've built a nationwide following on a social network, generating millions of impressions, you won't be able to reach this type of audience effectively through content marketing alone.
Setting Is an Accelerator
Content marketing requires a lot of volume to generate meaningful actions.
But with setting, you can generate many additional opportunities, particularly when targeting small businesses and independent professionals.
B2B cold calling is already extremely effective, even when targeting completely cold audiences. It's possible to generate between 1 and 4 meetings per day when prospecting larger SMEs, mid-sized companies and large corporations.
And with Sales Navigator, you can access a list of people who have visited your LinkedIn profile within the past 90 days.
By filtering these visitors by job title and other criteria, you can build a potentially substantial list of warm prospects to approach.
Your setter can then send targeted LinkedIn prospecting messages and/or emails, or even cold call these prospects directly.
This will often allow you to generate considerably more meetings, proportionally, than when prospecting a completely cold audience.
Setting Has Its Downsides: You Need to Filter Out Unqualified Prospects
One of the main downsides of setting, particularly when targeting small businesses and independent professionals, is that people who haven't booked a meeting may simply not have the budget.
In fact, that may be precisely why they didn't book a meeting directly through your LinkedIn profile in the first place.
It can be difficult to address the budget question right at the beginning of a cold call, but that's one of the main challenges of setting: booking meetings with genuinely qualified prospects.
This concern can be significantly reduced by targeting companies based on a minimum employee count.
For example, you could focus exclusively on small businesses with at least 6 employees.
See here for more information on how to segment your addressable market to maximize your chances of converting prospects.
Conclusion
Setting works extremely well, but particularly when targeting small businesses and independent professionals.
You simply need to be careful not to waste time with prospects who don't have the budget to buy your services!
If you're interested in launching a setting campaign or outsourcing your B2B prospecting, feel free to message me on louis@outbound-machine.com