Discover how the art of thoughtful giving can revolutionize your sales prospecting strategy, forging genuine connections that lead to fruitful partnerships. Read on to find out more about sending sales prospecting gifts!
In the world of Sales, possible customers are referred to as “prospects”. Prospecting is the art of finding viable customers to expand the size of a business’ potential customer base and increase the number of closed deals. There are several sales prospecting techniques business owners can employ to reach their desired audiences and effectively communicate with potential buyers – all this while getting closer and closer to their sales targets.
The task of identifying the correct marketing and cold communication tools may prove cumbersome, especially in the current climate where buyers dictate the market and are less likely to be prompted by traditional ‘buy me’ tactics to move down the sales funnel. It has therefore become increasingly essential for businesses to step outside the conventional prospecting box and explore other sales-enhancing avenues – one such being corporate gifting.
In this blog, we highlight some core sales prospecting techniques and pair them with well-curated corporate gifting campaigns to increase conversion, upselling, and retention probabilities. Keep reading for some well-polished pearls of gifting-backed sales prospecting wisdom.
Cut Losses, Qualify Your Prospects
Increasing your sales numbers without engaging in the process of prospecting is like expecting a plant to grow without the right soil. You need to create the right environment to get a return on investment on your sales efforts, and this means doing some initial groundwork through prospecting to continuously move enough leads through your pipeline.
An important step during prospecting is ‘qualifying’ – the process of determining whether a prospect fits the product or service offer. For example, car salespeople use questions centered around the ownership of a driver’s license and stable employment to determine whether a prospect is eligible for a car and insurance. This way, checks, and balances are adopted to eliminate non-convertible leads from the list. Not only does qualifying prospects prevent you from wasting time, but it also prevents wasting financial resources.
Tier Your Prospects According to Their Conversion Likelihood & Personalize Your Outreach
Once you have refined your prospect list and unqualified leads have been removed from the plowing field, the next step is to use inbound tactics to tier your prospects according to most and less likely to convert. Depending on the type of content or platform you use to gauge your prospects’ interest, create opportunities for your business to understand how to personalize offerings to suit each prospect’s needs. While 71% of buyers want to hear from sellers early in the buying process, there is also an insatiable need for reward-driven and personalized offers. While prospecting, you can capitalize on these needs.
Instead of opting for traditional ‘we have a solution to your problem’ pitches, initiate gifting campaigns to introduce your ideas and gauge your prospects’ interest. Getting a physical item in the hands of your lead deviates from what they expect to see from a company. Use this to break through the noise and show them that you value their business, by putting them first and opening the door for more conversation. You can engage your prospects through well-curated gifting campaigns as follows:
- Send surveys to collect more data about your prospects’ needs and offer gifts as a participation reward.
- When offering an improved version of your products to existing clients, add value by offering gifts to reignite brand familiarity and foster loyalty.
- Send a gift offer along with promotional material, a white paper or case study to peak their interest. For example, tell them that if they request a demo or call, they will receive a free gift.
- Webinar invitations – add that special touch by sending a gift once someone has accepted an invite, telling them that you are looking forward to having them there.
- Meeting invites – send a coffee voucher along with a meeting request, you would have paid for the coffee anyway!
- Thank prospects for meeting with you with a small personalized gift and keep your brand top of mind.
- Send a gift to thank them for using your free trial and to follow up on their experience, actively nudging them along the sales pipeline.
Employ Automated Tools to Enable Easy Tracking
Sales prospecting can be a daunting task, especially given the ever-changing buyer-centered culture. However, employing interactive automated tools to store buyer data, launch sale-centered campaigns, and report on progress will ensure that the elbow effort applied in identifying the right market for your product or service offerings yields the desired fruit.
Use a CRM for Sales Prospecting
Not only are CRMs essential for capturing prospect and client data for multi-departmental use, but they also enable client mapping. That is, users can create proactive value-allocation timelines and visually view each stage of their sales funnel for each of their clients, from initial contact to the decision-making stage. Additionally, users are able to track communication progress by analyzing and reporting on email campaigns. The entire life cycle of an account can be mapped, optimized, and tracked on a single platform.
By using a CRM like HubSpot to capture and store prospect data, you’ll also be able to integrate your CRM with the Giftsenda Platform and launch gifting campaigns without having to load delivery details in order to send gifts to prospects.
The Giftsenda Corporate Gifting Platform
Giftsenda is an international sales enablement platform, designed to help your business engage prospects and retain customers through gifting and direct mail. By using our gifting platform you can take the hard work out of gifting, and employ automated gifting tools to allow you to seamlessly send gifts to sales prospects in more than 200 countries worldwide. Some helpful features include:
- Personalized gift invites
- Shareable gift links that allow recipients to choose gifts from a specific gift collection
- Shareable gift links that allow recipients to choose gifts within a specific price range
- The ability to manage spend by sending gifts that will only be charged to your balance after being accepted by the recipient and approved by you
- The ability to create a single gift campaign that will cater to various countries worldwide
- Tracking and reporting on all gift campaigns to measure your ROI
Ready to get started with sending sales prospecting gifts? Book a 30-minute demo with one of our Gift Campaign Managers to see how the gifting platform works and to get access to Giftsenda so that you can start gifting.
PS. You can also check out this gifting cheat sheet for Sales professionals for some more useful tips!
