Blogs

Updated May 2025

There was a time when salespeople could land meetings by showing up to industrial parks with a box of donuts and eventually get a meeting with someone. Today those prospecting efforts won’t get you past the front door… unless your target appreciates the novelty of your approach.

It’s harder to get someone on the phone than ever before and can be even more difficult to set up a meeting.

Cold calling isn’t dead though, it’s just different than it used to be. If your team isn’t getting the same results they once did, it’s time to examine the tactics being used and adapt your processes to the way your prospects want to engage with you.

Key Article Takeaways

· How to target high-value prospects

· Craft compelling, role-specific messaging

· The importance of building relationships before selling

· Implement consistent, measurable outreach

Instead of focusing on a wide range of leads, your team needs to zero in on the targets most likely to buy. Determine your ideal customer profile and what makes them a good fit for your company. Then, equip your sales team with this clarity to support their prospecting.

Target the Right Buyer Personas

The next critical step is to define the appropriate contacts are within your targeted audience. Designing your sales outreach methodology to include multiple inroads through a variety of contact titles will greatly increase your odds for breakthrough.

Know the job titles, roles, and responsibilities of the people most likely to be the decision makers when it comes to buying from you. The buyer isn’t likely just one contact buy rather a group evaluating your solution from varying perspectives.

Ensure your sellers understand the pain points of your ideal contacts and can speak to each of them in a way that resonates with the priorities of their role.

What matters to an operations manager is going to be different than what captures the attention of an IT director or CFO.

Say the Right Things, in the Right Order

Now you know who you want to contact, but do you know what to say in order to capture their attention? How can you attract them to your company versus all the other options out there?

This is where the strength of your value proposition and your effectiveness in converting it into compelling messaging is put to the test.

Your outreach efforts should vary depending on who you target. Be intentional with building bite-sized messaging. Your objective is to capture your prospect’s attention with something interesting that can be read at a glance.

The art is using a variety of outreach methods to capture attention with cohesive content that all works together to gradually relay the various ways you can help. The only thing you’re trying to sell is an exploratory conversation, nothing else.

The best salespeople are exceptional relationship builders. Enable them with proven outreach messaging to improve new contact breakthroughs.

Most businesses greatly benefit by getting outside perspective to help them improve and expand their value proposition in order to uniquely separate themselves from their competition.

Be Patient, Helpful and Creatively Persistent

All too often a salesperson reaches out to a new contact just seconds after the prospect accepts their LinkedIn connection. They launch into a sales pitch and try to set up a meeting.

Just ask yourself, how often do you actually engage with someone when they treat your connection acceptance as permission to sales blitz? This approach will cost you credibility and may damage your chances for any meaningful conversation in the future.

Instead of selling right away, take a nurturing approach to building a relationship with your prospects.

Your goal is to stimulate the contact to engage. Connect with them. Correspond with them. Learn about their business and challenges without inserting yourself as the solution right away.

This may happen when they read a case study or industry insight report you provide. Perhaps you provide a short video introduction. Once the contact is showing engagement, inviting them to an upcoming webinar can be particularly effective.

Another pitfall is that most salespeople stop reaching out to a prospect after a few messages go unanswered. Sadly, this usually happens way too soon!

Your prospects need to know that you are reaching out to them because you passionately believe what you are selling will help them. When your prospect picks up on your resolve as you reach out that fifth, sixth, or seventh time, they recognize your conviction in what you are advocating and are more inclined to invest some attention on your outreach.

There is nothing more powerful than a salesperson who truly believes in the value of what they are representing.

Do the Work & Measure the Results

All of the previously mentioned strategies will improve your outreach, but if the volume of outreach effort isn’t there, then you may still fall short of your goals.

Your salespeople need reach out to contacts several times as part of an established cadence.

Make this process as easy as possible for your team. It can be as simple as setting up email templates in your email system or as advanced as incorporating a plug-in for your CRM that automates your multi-touch sales outreach process.

Providing a turnkey, easy-to-use outreach messaging model that follows a consistent cadence allows you to clearly measure prospecting effectiveness.

This level of efficiency also allows salespeople to spend their time pursuing new contacts instead of laboring over how to craft the perfect email or digging around to generate their next lead list.

If all reps are following a consistent outreach approach to all leads, then you can trust the insights your data shows you. Patterns will emerge to signal you when it makes sense to change elements of your outreach process to optimize your results.

Make sure your sales dashboard is providing you with the insight you need to identify shortcomings in your outreach efforts. If you’re not certain your dashboard is giving you the right information, my previous article will provide helpful pointers, “Does Your Sales Dashboard Provide Powerful Insight?”.

Equipping Your Sales Team for Success

The sales outreach tactics that you used to achieve success may have worked yesterday and could still be working to some extent today, but its just a matter of time before you’ll be forced to evolve to modern day methods.

You need to be continually adapting to the way your customers want to buy. If your processes don’t match this, then find ways to remove friction that gets in the way of setting meetings and uncovering new opportunities.

Your salespeople are great at selling. Give them the proper tools so their focus can stay on sales activity and relationship building. Make sure you are taking away as many non-selling tasks as you can.

There could be several reasons why your business development outreach isn’t working. If you are having issues connecting with contacts, let’s set up time to talk.

Any gaps you are seeing now need to be addressed before they grow into sizable problems later. Don’t wait, contact me at (678)-549-8834 or Michael@toplinesolutions.org or book a call through my Scheduling Tool.