How to Find High-Intent Prospects for Outbound Sales Teams

Finding the right prospects is a critical aspect of successful sales. To maximize sales efficiency and drive revenue, it is crucial to employ effective strategies for identifying high-intent prospects.

One of the most common issues that sales teams face is talking to the wrong prospects who do not have the interest, budget, and authority to buy your product.

Thus, it is crucial that your sales team spends the most time talking to high-intent prospects.

In this post, we'll talk about 4 ways to find high-intent prospects to increase your sales efficiency when doing outbound sales.

1. Utilize Tools to Find Prospects

Utilizing a tool that stores your prospect's information and allows you to find a company or contact using multiple criteria as filters is the most effective. Here are the tools that Relate Team relies on every day when prospecting.

Apollo.io

Apollo is a free tool that helps B2B sales teams search for prospects, capture contacts, and automatically send cold outbound emails. With Apollo, you can get prospect information based on company size, revenue, role, title, and more.

Integrating Apollo.io with Relate CRM for prospecting lets you find, save, and email customer information, making your sales efforts much more effective.

LinkedIn

You can find people working in a wide range of industries on LinkedIn, especially with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, a paid feature that, like Apollo, allows you to find companies and contacts based on company size, revenue, contact job function, title, and more.

You can contact them directly from LinkedIn via email, message, request a connection, or utilize the Apollo Chrome extension to get the email contacts of the reps you find on LinkedIn.

In the screenshot above, you can see how to run a cold email campaign right after saving the customer information for efficient outbound prospecting.

2. Subscribe Industry-Specific Newsletters

Industry-specific newsletters provide invaluable information about whom you should prospect. As the number of content services has increased, so have the number of newsletters that curate the latest news by industry. You can use these newsletters to identify opportunities and reach prospects with relevant information.

For example, if your business targets B2B startups, you can easily get the following information by subscribing to startup newsletters:

• Investment news
• Product launches
• New business information
• Alliance/partnership information
• Job openings

Funding news usually provides information about how the money will be spent. For example, if it's invested in product development, it could create opportunities to sell related products.

Or, if your prospect hired a new head of marketing, there's a chance she creates a new process by bringing in a new solution.

Based on the information you can find in newsletters, you can determine which prospects are most likely to have an interest in your product.

If you don't have industry-specific newsletters, you can use Google Alerts.

As shown in the screenshot above, you can enter specific keywords and get the latest news relevant to your specific keywords sent to your inbox.

The great thing about using newsletters and Google Alerts to find prospects is that you can personalize your outreach. Rather than sending the same email with outdated news to every prospect, you can be more effective by mentioning relevant, recent news.

3. Get Contact Information from Industry Conferences and Events

If there's a conference, webinar, etc., which targets the type of prospects you want to meet, you can attend and get the contact information of other participants.

For example, if the conference or webinar is about a problem your product can solve, chances are high that the prospects attending the webinar will be more inclined to buy.

In this case, you can either get their business card if it's an offline event or reach out to them via private message or email if it's online.

When reaching out, briefly mentioning which event you met them at will increase your chances of getting a response.

Example:

Hi {contact name},

I saw you at the {name of conference} and wanted to connect. How are you currently handling {problem} at {company name}?

Thanks,

{sender name}

4. Directly Ask for Primary Email and Phone Number

It's best if you can get your prospect's contact information from the three methods above, but if you can't, you can ask directly for their main email or phone number.

The caveat to this is that the first person who answers the phone will most likely not have a need for your product, in which case you'll need to convince them to give you the contact details of someone on their team or connect you directly.

Transferring unnecessary calls or passing on contacts can be very overwhelming for a first-time caller, so be concise and explain why you're calling and what you'd like to talk about.

Example:

Hi, this is {sender name} from the {sender company name}.

We're working on solving {problem} with [solution], and I'd like to ask you a few questions about {problem}. I'd like to reach out to you first by email, and I was wondering if I could get your email contact, or maybe we could connect for a quick call?

Thanks,

{sender name}

If you get their email contact, you can reach out to them directly or run a cold email campaign. If you're able to get someone on the phone right away, you'll want to move right into qualifying and convincing them to set up the next meeting.

Bonus: Leverage Communities

There are communities of professionals with similar backgrounds, job functions, and interests. For example, RevGenius and Bravado are communities for B2B Go-To-Market professionals.

It's important to note that each community has its own rules and regulations, and certain communities outright prohibit sales activity. And even if you're allowed to sell, you may get kicked out if you're only selling and not contributing to the community.

Optimize Prospecting Process

You must optimize how your sales teams find and engage with your prospects. There are always chances to improve how to find high-intent prospects from different channels and with different tools.

If you fail to find high-quality prospects, it can greatly impact your pipeline down the road and, ultimately, your revenue.

Thus, it is essential that you focus on finding high-intent prospects.