In this article I want you to understand very well what prospects are within the corporate customer acquisition process.
Technically a prospect is someone who has the potential to become a lead.
A lead is a person (who works for a company) who shows interest in your company to potentially influence the purchase of your products and services in order to fill a need.
A customer is a lead who is convinced that your company is the best option on the market to the point of acquiring your solution.
So the escalation is this: Prospect ==> Lead ==> Client
Where do we find the best prospects to approach either by phone, email or to run an ad campaign?
They are in one of those places:
- In your companies
- In their homes
- At trade fairs and events
- On the social networks
The two most effective ways for you to approach a prospect is by phone with email support and with social media ads.
The ideal is to combine both ways: You build a list of people with good potential and approach them by phone+E-mail and advertisements.
We will deal in detail with this strategy in an exclusive article.
Now I want to stick to your definition of a prospect. What is the ideal profile of this person and the ideal profile of the company they work for?
For example: production managers of small textile factories located in the State of São Paulo.
See the parameters: Function (management), Area (production), Seniority (management), Segment (textile), Size (small companies) and Location (SP).
So when we talk about prospects, we mean those characteristics:
- Function of the person
- Person's area of activity within the company
- Seniority of the person
- Segment in which the company operates
- Size of the company
- Company location
Now that we have these definitions, we are in a position to prepare the approach and campaign, as both to be effective need to address pains and values potentially recognised by prospects.
In our terminology we can call prospects TARGET, as soon as we have this definition.
Example: The target of the campaign is "Finance directors of large IT companies nationwide".
We cannot talk about customer acquisition processes, either in lead generation or conversion, without having a clear definition of the target.
Nothing stops us from changing the target of a campaign that is not meeting the expected results, but this will in any case change the approach scripts as well as the ads, articles etc.
The best way to define the target is to dissect the values generated by the Entry Product and ask yourself who would potentially have a window of opportunity to pay for those benefits.
Because you see, without that window of opportunity open, i.e. context of present need, there will be no purchase, since the potential is still in the latent state.
For example, if our target is "textile factory production managers", mentioned above, and our entry product is "machinery maintenance services", then the context where these managers would be very likely to listen to us and receive a proposal is a factory with a lot of downtime due to machinery breakdown. So we have to ask ourselves: What market segment has potential for machines that break down all the time that our services could compete with, including in-house solutions?
We have to think of a targeting strategy that takes the context into consideration, so there can be no dissociation between the entry product and the target, as we have already dealt with in the Prospecting Tripod.
So, every time we talk about attracting leads, we have to have in mind which is the entrance product and which is the target, that is, which are the prospects with the highest potential to become leads.
We deal here with the definition of Prospects, i.e. the Target of the fundraising campaign.
