38% of B2B sellers say ensuring lead quality is their second biggest challenge during prospecting. And that’s one of the key reasons why your sales reps don’t hear a response from prospects — because they didn’t fit your ICP, didn’t need your products or services or aren’t sales-ready yet. When step #1 of your sales prospecting process is not done right, it’s obvious for your prospecting efforts to fail.

That’s where a sales prospecting plan comes in. 

In this article, we’ll guide you through a step-by-step process on creating your perfect sales prospecting plan. Let’s dive right in.

What is a sales prospecting plan?

A sales prospecting plan outlines a detailed strategy on how to precisely identify and contact potential customers interested in your products or services. 

Some of the key elements of a prospecting plan are:

• Personas of your best-fit customers
• Defined audience segment and messaging
• Conversion goals and KPIs
• Sales qualification criteria

Why do you need a sales prospecting plan?

Without a comprehensive sales prospecting plan in place, sales reps will naturally struggle with unqualified leads and find it increasingly hard to close winning deals.  

That's where a sales prospecting plan comes in. It helps you:

• Get quality and sales-ready leads
• Keep your prospecting efforts structured
• Build a healthy sales pipeline

How to know if your sales prospecting is not working?

Reality check: even your best sales prospecting techniques are likely to fail. If a specific technique worked for your competitors' sales teams, it might not play out in the same way for you. So, the key is to closely observe your prospecting efforts, identify potential weak spots, and improve.

But before doing that, let's shed light on a few possible reasons why your current prospecting techniques aren’t yielding the best of results:

• Sales reps spend more time doing manual work. Sales reps spend most of their time doing repetitive tasks like conducting research, sorting data, and crafting sales communication. 
• Conversion rate is too low. Do your sales reps have plenty of leads in the pipeline, but still record low conversions? Perhaps, they need to learn to filter leads better and conduct a SWOT analysis of your current strategy. 
• Sales reps struggle with identifying the prospect’s pain points. Without identifying the prospect’s challenges, sales reps cannot correctly pinpoint how your product can solve their problems. This means they cannot craft their pitch and communicate effectively with the prospect. 
• Sales reps are crafting generic cold emails. To get conversions through cold emails, sales reps need to make them more personalized. For instance, emphasizing on the prospect’s pain points, understanding their needs, identifying their current tech stack, and getting to know of their recent achievements are all ways your reps can connect with them and get faster responses. 

How to build the perfect sales prospecting plan?

Even companies with industry-leading products can struggle if their sales teams don’t have a foolproof sales prospecting plan in place. 

To ensure you create the best prospecting plan and convert prospects into customers, here's a definitive, 6-step process:

Step 1: Identify your ideal customer profile (ICP)

When you identify and establish your ideal customer persona (ICP), you can understand and target potential customers who’re genuinely interested in your products and services. It is because of correct ICP identification that sales reps can craft better pitches and build stronger rapports.

For example, let’s say you’re selling a project management tool and your ICP is a project manager from an early-stage business. Here’s what their persona would look like:

Small team: project manager

Age: 18-55

Where do they work: Seed/Series A funded B2B SaaS startup

Size of the organization: 11-50 

Responsibilities:

• Establish and maintain relationships with the product delivery, sales, customer support, and account management teams.
• Develop an execution plan for projects.
• Track projects to ensure the scope is delivered within the budget and planned timelines.
• Ensure transparent allocation of project team resources.
• Provide coaching and tools to project team members for effective and efficient project management.

Pain points:

• Setting unrealistic deadlines
• Difficulty in cross-communication
• Lack of accountability
• Managing stakeholder expectations

To craft such detailed ICPs, you need the following information:

• Firmographic information. Company size, location, revenue, the prospect’s tech stack, and trigger events such as new hires and recent funding announcements.
• Decision-making information. Job title, salary and prospect’s needs.
• Needs, pains and frustrations. The prospect’s pain points, goals and aspirations.

But, developing your ideal customer persona (ICP) can be a painstaking process. And, in most cases, time-consuming too. That’s where sales reps can leverage AI to generate ICPs.

For instance, Happysales AI’s DISC personality feature uses the DISC framework to assess the prospect's personality. This helps sales reps understand the prospect better, which further improves the overall prospecting efforts — right from crafting an informed pitch to sending out a personalized email.

Step 2: Set goals

Exceeding sales targets is one of the primary goals of sales reps, according to Hubspot’s 2024 State of Sales Report. 

Setting a high conversion bar means your reps have to get better at prospecting too, and keep the leads coming. This could mean reaching out to 40 prospects in a day, for example, or booking 20 meetings in a month. 

To achieve such numbers with prospecting, leverage SMART goals. The acronym, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. This framework uses a specific criteria to ensure that your goals are clearly defined and achievable within a certain timeframe. 

This eliminates the chances of guesswork and vagueness, sets a clear timeline and target the SDRs must meet, and makes it easier to track the success of prospecting efforts. 

Let’s understand the applications of SMART goals framework better with a few examples:

• Specific. Using prospecting channels like emails and LinkedIn to reach out to prospects.
• Measurable. Number of sales-ready leads in the pipeline.
• Achievable. Closing new deals worth $200k ARR.
• Relevant. Sending 150 Twitter DMs when the prospects are active on Twitter.
• Timely. Sending 100 LinkedIn connection requests per week. 

Step 3: Create a sales qualification checklist

Sales qualification is the process through which reps identify sales-ready leads. This is a mandatory exercise for sales reps before deciding to invest their time on a specific lead.

You can do this by getting answers to the following questions during your prospecting or discovery call process:

• What are the challenges you’re currently experiencing?
• How is this problem impacting your business?
• What is your budget range?
• Who are the other decision-makers involved in the process?
• What specific features are you looking for?
• Have you used similar tools in the past?

BONUS: Combine these questions with the lead scoring method. 

For example, consider you’re selling a time tracking tool.You’re in talks with a prospect from an enterprise company that works remotely and their biggest challenge is that they’re unable to detect how and where their teams are spending time on a specific task or project. You also know that they have a budget of $500+. The lead score in this case would be 5/5 based on your qualification criteria. 

Step 4: Develop a sales script

Without a sales script, it’s easy for sales reps to go haywire. Think: no control over yourself and the prospect’s time, using the same pitch repeatedly for different customer personas.

Solution? Develop a sales script. 

With a sales script in place, sales reps can boost their sales efficiency, increase rapport, reduce their stress levels, and improve the consistency of the overall company messaging.

But, how to develop an informed sales script? Here’s how:

• Introduce yourself. Share your name and the company you work at. This provides leads with an understanding of who they’re talking to.
• Use a positioning statement. The positioning statement shows that the sales rep understands the prospect's challenges and has experience solving them. Alternatively, you can also give details about the company or the product and the kind of clients your company has worked with. 
• Add a CTA. The CTA should be something that helps you start a conversation with the prospect. For example, offering a product demo.
• Check their availability. Ask them about their availability to schedule a call. A good way is to give them a few options using appointment scheduling tools like Calendly.

Check out this short and to-the-point email by Toplyne that highlights these best practices.

Using AI for sales prospecting tools like Happysales AI, you can combine the best personality, market and account insights, and generate perfect pitches.

Step 5: Integrate AI into your sales workflows

Did you know that sales reps spend 72% of their time on non-selling activities? In fact, 36.1% of their time is spent entirely on manual work:

• 9.2% time prioritizing leads and 9.3% researching prospects
• 8.8% of their time manually entering customer data and administrative tasks

While these mundane tasks are a non-negligible part of the sales process, they eat half of the reps’ time, leaving them very little for actual prospecting. With AI tools, you can change this landscape. In fact, 81% sales pros say that AI can help them spend less time on manual tasks. 

For example, if a sales rep has created a lead list and wants to reach out to them via cold calls or emails, they’ll need personalized icebreakers for each one of them. Going through each lead’s LinkedIn profile, analyzing their LinkedIn posts and company information can take a lot of time when done manually. 

But when you use tools like Happysales AI, you can automatically generate icebreakers based on the prospect’s personality. 

That’s not all. With Happysales AI, sales reps can:

• Generate personalized icebreakers
• Uncover prospect’s pain points and craft personalized sales pitches
• Develop ICPs by understanding the prospect’s personality using DISC analysis
• Get quick summaries of prospects and their company
• Improve your sales skills with AI roleplays

Sales Prospecting Plan Best Practices

Your sales prospecting roadmap might not be effective if you aren't aware of the best practices to optimize your prospecting approach. =

Here are 3 sales prospecting best practices you can leverage:

1. Update your sales stack

Assess your sales team’s workflow and identify the tasks that take up most of their time. Ask yourself: can this particular task be automated? 

For instance, as a sales manager, it can be difficult to coach newbie sales reps while performing other responsibilities. So, to coach the newbie SDR, you need to do roleplays to help them polish their sales skills and improve their pitches. 

With Happysales AI's AI Coach feature, you can roleplay with the sales rep and provide them actionable feedback to improve their overall communication style.

So, look for tools that can automate tasks in your sales workflow and add them to your sales stack. Review and update the tools in your sales stack every year.

2. Use AI-generated personalized phone and email scripts

To craft personalized phone and email scripts, you need to conduct prospect research, understand the prospect’s personality, find icebreakers for each persona, and craft the script.

With Happysales AI’s DISC-personality feature, you can assess the prospect’s personality based on the DISC framework. If the prospect falls in the D-personality type, the sales reps need to have a more confident, well-researched, and precisely on-point script. They’ll need to be more prepared with this prospect in terms of handling objections.

Based on this personality analysis, you can generate personality-focused icebreakers with the help of AI and use them in your script. 

3. Allocate time for prospecting

Fix a time for prospecting that brings you the best conversions and leverage it to its full potential. 

Let's take a look at the best days and times you can execute cold calls and emails for better conversions. 

According to a study by CallHippo, here are the best days and times for cold calling the prospect:

Here’s another research by Hubspot showcasing the best days and times the sales reps made the first contact:

Comparing both the studies, here are the best days and time for cold calling:

• Best days: Wednesdays and Thursdays
• Best time: Late afternoon i.e, 4PM - 5PM

According to the data analyzed by CIENCE: 

• The best days to send cold emails are Wednesdays and Thursdays. 
• The best time to send cold emails is during the early morning and early afternoon i.e., 9 -11 AM and 2 PM.

On the contrary, Siege Media found out the following:

• Best days: Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays
• Best time: 9AM - 12 PM

Based on these studies, we can conclude that Wednesday is by far the best day to send cold emails during the morning hours between 9AM - 12PM.

💡Pro tip: Based on these analyses, send out cold emails, conduct calls, and monitor the the conversion and reply rates. Double down on the days and times where you see maximum conversions. 

Get Your AI-Generated Sales Prospecting Plan Templates with Happysales AI

Lead quality is not the sole reason your message hasn't seen the daylight in the prospect’s inbox. It also boils down to generic and irrelevant messaging. 

Every time you reach out to new, qualified leads, you'll have to craft the message from scratch. This only adds more repetitive tasks to your existing sales workflow. 

Instead, use AI-generated sales prospecting templates relevant to different personas with Happysales AI. All you have to do is craft a personalized message based on different buyer personas, edit and customize it when you're sending the pitch to each persona. 

‍Get started with Happysales and see how it simplifies your sales prospecting workflows.