How to build your ultimate remote prospecting system

In today’s issue, I’ll share the exacts steps I follow to build a remote prospecting system. When selling remotely, it can get challenging to prospect. You don’t have a boss on your back, checking your activity, and you can easily procrastinate. Without the energy of a sales floor, creating consistent prospecting results is a lot harder than it looks.

I’ll show you how you can address this challenge in 3 simple steps.

Why remote prospecting is different from office prospecting?

Remote prospecting is quite different than prospecting from an office. When I started in tech sales in 2015, I joined a team of 30 in Berlin. We were all prospecting from the office. There was a great vibe, and a healthy competition. We were all opening new markets, and the camaraderie helped us book a ton of meetings.

Now imagine prospecting from your home office. You’re sitting alone in your bedroom, only interrupted by the noise of Slack notifications. If you want to speak to someone, you need to send and invitation, jump on a Zoom meeting, and fight with your camera to work. If you start getting tired, you can easily go for a quick nap, or start doing your chores.

This environment is the absolute worst if you want to prospect, which is why you need to create systems and rituals to fix your environment.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Plan your prospecting system

Let’s be honest, prospecting isn’t fun. You keep repeating the same task over and over, you get rejected a lot more than you’d like, and your only reward is a meeting booked (which has less than 30% of turning into business). It’s super hard to do consistently.

If you want to prospect regularly, you need to start by protecting your time. When it’s done, I recommend starting with follow-up messages, then finding new contacts to add to your sequence (determine how many you need here). When you’re done, add these people to your sequence (send them the first touchpoint), and you’re done for the day!

A prospecting system also needs a solid sequence. It’s a set of steps you follow until you either get a reply, or run out of steps. Here’s how I recommend creating your sequence.

When your sequence skeleton is done, you need to define what you’re going to write or say. I recommend using my prospecting template swipe file to do so.

Step 2: Get some quick wins

There’s a crazy misconception about outbound prospecting.

Salespeople believe their meetings won’t be worth as much if they are booked with someone they know, over a total stranger. I believed that for years, and my trajectory completely changed when I started including people I knew. Instead of chasing net new logos, contact past or current customers, lost opportunities, or people you know outside of work (they have to be relevant though).

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t contact people if you don’t know them, but it will make your prospecting more interesting because you’ll get a few replies and you won’t just get people ignoring you.

Another thing salespeople focus too much on is planning. They get stuck in the ideation phase, tweaking their messaging and channel before getting started. Instead, define your activity target (use the sales process calculator), create a quick sequence, and send messages.

At first, you won’t get much results. Your first two weeks will be the toughest. But if you prospect every single weekday, you’ll reach an optimal activity level, and you’ll gather enough data to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Step 3: Track early signs of success

I remember when I started my first sales job. I was obsessed with closing my first deal. You could feel it in everything I was doing. My prospecting messages where focused on getting people to sign, and all my calls were extremely pushy and aggressive. Josh Braun calls this the “commission breath”. That’s the biggest mistake I see when coaching salespeople.

Instead of obsessing over closing deals, focus on your early signs of success.

When using email, your first sign of success is your email landing in the primary inbox of your prospect (sounds obvious, but a lot harder than you think). If you’re having trouble with this, I recommend checking Maildoso. Your second sign of success with email is the open rate. Anything under 50% has to be worked on.

When using LinkedIn, your early sign of success is the invitation acceptance rate. If people do not accept your invitation, you won’t be able to message them, send them voice notes, or videos.

This is how you can build a simple remote prospecting system. Plan your system, get some quick wins, and track your early signs of success. And if you’ve already tried all this, but you need more advanced support, then I recommend checking my Prospecting Engine.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris