Prospecting in sales is the initiation and development of new business. Prospecting involves searching for new clients for your goods or services. The most important aspect of prospecting is to identify the clients that best fit your products or services.

Prospecting should be a collective effort between the sales and marketing teams. Some salespeople lack the support of their marketing counterparts. Therefore, the sales team has to venture alone. Despite such setbacks, sales must succeed.

You must, in one way or another, generate your sales leads and meet your revenue targets.

Social media presents some of the best platforms for finding new B2B prospects. Social media makes it easier to pinpoint the best-fit clients for your products or services. Social media becomes more powerful when you convert your leads into offline or in-person interactions.

Below is a ten-step social prospecting list. With this guide, you can learn how to prospect for clients efficiently.

Step 1: List Your Targets

Before you can begin to engage your prospects, you need to brainstorm and do some research. Think about the products and services that you offer. Who will be your ideal client or customer?

Develop a list of at least five companies within your vicinity that would make great accounts. It helps to ensure that your targets resemble the clients that you already have. If you have any specific contacts in mind, list them as well.

Step 2: List Job Titles

For B2B social prospecting, you are targeting specific people in different organizations. Each prospect has a role in their company. Some prospects will be key decision-makers in their companies.

Against your list of targets, assign each individual with a job title. Why is this step crucial? Because assigning job titles helps you identify which target is appropriate for prospecting.

Step 3: Perform Regular Company Searches on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for prospecting. LinkedIn comes with tools that complement B2B social prospecting. The "Search" button in the top navigation bar can help you find prospects. Key in the targets in your list and perform company searches.

Step 4: Find Out More About the People Working in these Companies

Take advantage of LinkedIn in-built tools. Click on the "See All" function against your target companies. This function will help you find lists of people that work in these companies.

Performing a search up to this point is useful. To make more powerful connections, you will have to dig deeper. This aspect brings us to your next step.

Step 5: Identify the Prospects with Mutual Connections

You've performed a company search. You've refined the search to the people that work in these companies. Now it's time to find links (if any) between these connections.

Look for 1st and 2nd-degree connections. List your 1st-degree candidates. You could turn these individuals into referral candidates.

Step 6: List Your Second Degree Prospects

Second-degree connections are mutual contacts that you share with your prospects. To identify your second-degree prospects, find out about  your "Shared Connections."

List down your second-degree prospects along with their "Shared Connection."

Step 7: Facebook Graph Search

Take advantage of the power of Facebook's Graph Search. Remember the job titles that you listed in step 2? Use Facebook's Search Engine to search these job titles. This step is similar to the company search that you did on LinkedIn, except that you are performing it on Facebook.

Step 8: Pinpoint Your Prospects via Title and Company

You have carried out a Facebook search using job titles in the previous step. For this step, you are going to repeat the Facebook search. This time, include the company name against the job title.

Step 9: List Your Results

Study the results that you yield from the search in step 8. Identify the appropriate prospects and jot them down. Sharing mutual friends with your prospects could work to your advantage. List down the names of your mutual friends.

Step 10: Review Your Findings, Take the Appropriate Action

With tools like Facebook and LinkedIn, you can gather a lot of information that may aid your prospecting efforts. These platforms can yield some great prospects.

After reviewing your findings, make a point of reaching out. Reach out to the mutual connections that you share with your prospects. Inquire about the kind of relationship that they share with your prospect. Ask for an introduction to the prospect and plan your pitch.

The Bottomline

Prospection is about identifying and recruiting possible clients for your products or services. In the era of social media, you have to take advantage of the various platforms to grow your business and push towards your sales targets.

There is no clear-cut way of prospecting for new clients. We can only use our experience to recommend the practices that yield the best results. With the checklist above, you have the help you need to prospect for new clients.

Consider our recommendations and happy prospecting.