How to prospect without harassing people
B2B prospection can be counter-productive, if it is done recklessly and without structure
3/25/20264 min read
How to Prospect Effectively Without Harassing Your Prospects (too much)
You've got a B2B product or service to sell, and you've already acquired a decent number of customers...
But you'd like to fill your calendar, reach a new revenue milestone, stop depending entirely on inbound leads (which aren't necessarily as qualified as you'd like), or make sure your sales team always has enough opportunities to work on.
So you need to invest in marketing and/or B2B prospecting to generate new business opportunities, secure new partnerships and referrals, expand your network, and so on.
It makes perfect sense to use prospecting or marketing to achieve these goals. B2B markets are often enormous, sometimes containing tens of thousands of potential customer companies or even more.
It's impossible to know everyone. Sometimes, you think you know everyone in your market, when in reality you've only scratched the surface.
Even in smaller, more specialized markets targeting enterprise accounts, prospecting can be extremely worthwhile.
In fact, these are precisely the situations where B2B prospecting offers the best ROI compared with marketing: you can have a significant impact on a limited number of people, whereas marketing tends to be more effective when targeting large audiences with lower average deal values.
Of course, if you're operating in an extremely narrow market with only a dozen or a few dozen potential customer companies, things are different.
You'll need to implement a highly personalized multichannel prospecting strategy and probably prioritize face-to-face interactions (trade shows, networking events, industry conferences, etc.).
However, when you decide to prospect your B2B market, you risk damaging your brand reputation if you're too aggressive or repeatedly target the same people too frequently.
You could end up turning prospects against you instead of attracting them, which would obviously be counterproductive.
B2B prospecting is all about finding the right balance between being completely invisible and being overly present.
The Prospecting Cycle
When you decide to target a list of companies, you need to respect certain timelines and understand how long to wait between interactions to avoid harassing your prospects.
A) How Much Time Should You Leave Between Each Touchpoint?
Just like digital advertising, B2B prospecting works through multiple touchpoints: the number of messages sent to prospects and the timing between them.
Whether you're running email sequences or sending LinkedIn messages, sending a single, overly long message isn't effective.
These types of messages often go unread.
It's generally much better to send several short messages, which have a higher chance of being read, leaving at least 2 to 3 days between each one.
Don't overdo your email follow-ups either. As a general rule, limit yourself to a maximum of 6 emails.
With cold calling, you shouldn't call the same person too frequently.
You can call someone twice in a single day, but if they don't answer, wait at least 4 to 5 business days before trying again.
And if certain prospects still haven't answered after attempts spread across 3 different days, you can consider moving on. They're probably not going to pick up.
Yes, cold calling won't allow you to reach everyone. That's one of the main reasons why multichannel prospecting is so relevant.
Some salespeople, instead of moving on, call the same people every single day. This can trigger strong and lasting negative reactions.
What should you do when prospects tell you they're not interested? (Most of them won't be interested, after all.)
Obviously, don't call them again or send them another message the following day.
At that point, you're no longer doing intelligent B2B prospecting. You're just spamming people.
B) The Prospecting Cycle: How Often Should You Recontact Prospects?
Once a prospect understands your offering and has told you they're not interested, you should stop contacting them.
Similarly, if someone hasn't responded to your emails, LinkedIn messages or phone calls after several weeks of outreach, it's probably time to move on.
Otherwise, you risk permanently destroying any chance of working together in the future.
However, that doesn't mean you should stop prospecting them forever.
You simply need to leave enough time before getting back in touch.
Typically, you should leave at least 4 to 6 months between prospecting cycles targeting the same prospect or company.
A lot can change in 4 to 6 months. Business priorities evolve, internal processes change, your market may become more educated about the type of solution you're offering, and your previous messages may have planted a few seeds, even if the prospect wasn't interested at the time.
The company may even have undergone organizational changes, with new people joining the teams you originally targeted.
The C-level executive you spoke to a few months ago may have left the company, been replaced, or simply changed their mind.
(Only fools never change their minds.)
In any case, after 4 to 6 months, most people will have forgotten about you.
That's a good time to start prospecting again, always in a respectful way.
Most prospects won't even remember you or the fact that they turned you down a few months earlier.
Most will still say no. That won't change.
But, just like before, a minority of prospects will show curiosity or interest and be willing to have a conversation.
You'll therefore have another opportunity to develop new business relationships.
That's precisely why the infinity symbol is the logo of my Outbound Machine offer.
Conclusion
Good B2B prospecting isn't about harassing someone continuously until they finally agree to a meeting.
That's spam, and it won't get you anywhere.
The idea is to contact people in a targeted way, with sufficiently long intervals between interactions, so that you occasionally come to mind without becoming a nuisance.
This allows you to consistently book meetings with different prospects, nurture relationships with many other companies, develop new B2B partnerships and expand your network, all without damaging your brand reputation.
On the other hand, if you keep contacting the same prospects too frequently and too many times, you'll burn through your market and damage your brand.
That will make any future business relationship with those companies considerably harder to establish.