How to Personalize Your Sales Prospecting to Stand Out
Learn the secrets for sales prospecting personalization you can do easily and at scale. Get prospecting personalization tips with examples.
Set as Preferred Source
Sales prospecting is a lengthy process regardless of the industry. From tracking down prospects, acing cold outreach, and building the sales pipeline — sales teams do it all.
No wonder that among salespeople, many agree that prospecting presents the greatest challenge within the sales process. And as competition peaks, the entire process becomes even more challenging.
But there’s a simple way to ease prospecting, fasten the deal closure time, and stand out. It’s through personalization.
This article breaks down a number of unique ways to personalize sales prospecting and win against the competition.
source: cience.com
Percent of customers that say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business
% of responders
| Positive answer | |
|---|---|
| Customer | 84% |
| Business buyer | 83% |
8 ways to personalize sales prospecting
1) Address customer pain points
No two B2B customers are alike. Therefore, to personalize sales prospecting, you must first speak to each customer directly and solve their unique problems, aka pain points.
Why is identifying a pain point necessary? Learning about each B2B buyer’s business pain point lets you tweak your sales pitch and offer your product or service as the ultimate solution to fix their pain point.
But how can you start identifying customer pain points?
- Review recorded conversations with past prospects who eventually became loyal customers
- Run surveys
- Conducting interviews
- Analyzing behavioral and engagement data
- Perform social listening
- Employ sales software designed to manage customer experience to assist you in gathering and analyzing customer data
2) Personalize based on intent and interest
Identify the key stages of the sales cycle and the customer intent throughout.
From problem awareness to follow-ups, a prospect’s journey has many key stages throughout a sales cycle. And each stage further dictates the level of interest or intent a customer possesses.
5 stages of a sales cycle that can be personalized:
- Awareness stage: Product or service-aware prospects who are in the researching phase. Free resources like blog posts, whitepapers, videos, webinars work best. Ensure that you’re creating solid resources with the right tools, like a video maker and so on.
- Interest stage: A prospect shows interest in a product or service by attending your sales presentation, visiting your website, or reading your case study.
- Consideration stage: The prospect has evaluated the alternatives, has liked your pitch, and is inching closer to finalizing the deal.
- Decision stage: The prospect has zeroed in on your product or service post-attending a live demo, has used your tool’s free trial, accessed coupons, etc.
- Follow-up stage: In this stage, the new customer needs frequent check-ins from the sales teams for post-call support, and it’s a great opportunity for upsells/cross-sells.
As it’s evident, each stage is unique in its end goal. So it only makes sense to personalize content for sales pitches at each stage to attract warm leads.
How to personalize your sales collateral
You can create engaging, hyper-personalized decks at scale for your preferred stage in minutes with the help of Storydoc’s sales collateral creator.
5 steps you can take to start personalizing your sales collateral:
- Pick a ready-to-use sales collateral template.
- Use the automated design to just edit and type in the text to customize your deck or case study.
- Make it more appealing by adding animations and graphics with a click.
- Update the template’s design to match your branding. And you’re done.
- Finally, use Storydoc’s analytics to see how your presentations or case studies performed to optimize the upcoming ones.
You can easily automate personalization at scale by integrating Storydoc with your sales CRM. Storydoc then pulls the prospects’ information directly from there, automatically, and also sends back engagement tracking data!
3) Add personal details to your call script
Establishing a personal connection on the sales call is the best starting point to ensure a smooth flow of conversation. It lets you take off the sales pitch on the right note rather than seeming too salesy or pushy at the get-go.
Many sales reps think they do not have enough information before a sales call.
The solution is a handy sales call script. You could add the prospect’s personal details to your sales call script beforehand and make the conversation worthwhile.
For instance, mention a common connection like similar backgrounds, cities, etc., or comment on a new piece of news you find while researching about their company, and so on.
Also, if you’re on a call with a qualified lead, you can talk about their responses and need to set the tone at the beginning of the call.
4) Using personalized data & case studies
B2B buyers trust social proof. Nearly 50% of SaaS companies agree case studies drive their sales according to a 2023 Uplift Content study.
How effective are these marketing tactics in increasing sales for SaaS companies?
Source: Uplift content
% of SaaS marketers who report “very effective” results based on marketing tactics
| 2023 | 2022 | |
|---|---|---|
| Case studies | 47% | 39% |
| SEO | 29% | 29% |
| Website content | 29% | 21% |
| Email sequences | 28% | 19% |
| White papers & reports | 22% | 17% |
| Social media posts | 20% | 12% |
| Blog posts | 16% | 11% |
Business case studies provide in-depth high-credibility social proof, and adding them to your sales prospecting approach will bring prospects closer to conversion.
But there’s a catch. Just adding any generic case study will not fetch you the desired result.
When including a case study in your sales pitch or deck, remember to study your prospect’s personalized data like needs, pain points, interests, etc. Next, use a case study that matches their current stage.
Use real-life examples of your successful customers as case studies. Suppose a prospect is keen on a CRM automation product. Instead of using a general case study, showcase one that explains how your CRM automation solution helped a company succeed.
Case studies should tell an engaging story and be easily understood. A tool like Storydoc can help you create high-converting case studies on the go.
5) Personalize your proposals
Most sales teams do not pay heed to creating personalized proposals and presentations. They have a very standardized approach to proposal creation that’s mostly impersonal and non-contextual to the prospect in question.
But the truth is, a killer proposal can inch you closer to sealing the deal. The right personalization lets you stand out and stay on top of your prospects’ minds.
How can you personalize your proposals?
Monitor prospect behavior, and understand each prospect’s interest level and the decision-making stage they’re at.
This entire process may seem tedious, but it doesn’t have to be with a quick and easy AI proposal creator backed by real-time user analytics.
6) Segment warm leads and send handwritten notes
Reaching out to leads through digital mediums alone is getting harder by the day. Due to the vast competition online, there’s a high chance of potential leads missing out on your communication.
A short handwritten note is a traditional yet effective method to establish a friendly connection with leads.
Studies suggest handwritten notes have the highest open rate at 99%. But sending handwritten notes to each and every prospect can get expensive.
So segment your warm leads depending on their level of interest in your product or service.
Companies rarely use handwritten notes despite the human touch they offer to sales. Thus, sending them lets hot leads know you’re approachable and willing to put in the extra effort.
And the biggest plus? They ensure warm leads do not fall out of the prospecting pipeline.
7) Personalized prospecting landing pages
Make it easy for your prospects to glide down the sales funnel through personalized sales prospecting landing pages. A simple, customized landing page can make a vast difference.
Imagine offering a warm prospect a link to your website landing page once they’ve shown deep interest in your CRM solution, for instance.
If the landing page headline reads their name and the rest of the page speaks clearly about their liked product, the CRM tool, in this case, they’re sold.
Here are some tips for building and personalizing a prospecting landing page:
- Create a dedicated landing page for each client persona with slight but meaningful modifications to their voice, appearance, geography, and other aspects.
- Make tailored landing pages for distinct use cases that focus on relevant features, benefits, and outcomes for that use case (and applied to text, images, and videos).
- Use social proof that’s specific and resembles distinct types of prospects (including product demo examples, quotes, and testimonials)
- Personalize your CTA to specific prospects and its message to their client persona and use case
- Embed dynamic variables that plug in the prospect’s personal information like name, job title, company, and other information. You can do this quite easily with any landing page built with Storydoc.
8) Thoughtful follow-ups
Irrespective of a conversation’s progress, follow up with every lead, whether they convert or not.
A simple thank-you card, a personalized cold email, or sending meeting notes lets prospects and customers know that you’ve put in the maximum effort and are genuinely passionate about fetching them results.
Following up thoughtfully from time to time has several benefits in sales. From reminding customers to renew their services to wishing them on special occasions, follow-ups help build the sales pipeline.
Most importantly, such thoughtful follow-ups lead to customers and prospects keeping you on top of their minds. That means more referrals and word-of-mouth giving you additional leads.
