Prospecting 2024: Keys to Success for Small Businesses

As an entrepreneur or manager of a small business with fewer than 15 employees, you face a number of challenges: finding effective tools, identifying potential customers, obtaining their contact details, and determining how and when to prospect. Should you delegate your prospecting or establish partnerships? At Humanlinker, we understand the complexity of these issues, and offer clear steps to help you adapt to this new context.
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Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile and Your Company's Profile

Having a well-groomed LinkedIn profile is crucial in 2023, especially with the increasing use of prospecting software that relies on this platform.

Why an Optimized Profile is Important:
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1. Creates a Positive First Impression: A professional photo and complete profile immediately establish your seriousness and professionalism.
2. Increases Visibility and Credibility: A profile rich in keywords and relevant information more easily attracts the attention of potential customers and builds trust.
3. Improves the effectiveness of prospecting tools: A complete profile ensures that prospecting software finds you and presents you appropriately to prospects.

Tips for optimizing your Profile :
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1. Choose a Professional Photo: A clear, formal photo gives a professional image.
2. Clear Title and Summary: Make sure your title reflects your role and your summary highlights your skills and experience.
3. Update Your Experience: Detail your previous and current roles, focusing on skills relevant to your industry.

To further optimize your LinkedIn profile, we have made a blog post with all the tips to use in 2023 so that you are as visisble as possible, it is available here :

Optimize your Company Profile:
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1. Brand Consistency: Use images and language that reflect your company's identity and values.
2. Engaging Content: Publish regular articles and updates to demonstrate your expertise and keep your network engaged.
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By fine-tuning your personal and company profiles on LinkedIn, you greatly increase your chances of success in digital prospecting.
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Organize your typical week
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Time management is crucial. Define how much time you can devote to prospecting. We recommend setting aside 2-hour slots at the end of each day for this activity, as illustrated in our visual guide.

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Define Your Strategy According to Your Offer and Your Targets
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Defining your prospecting strategy according to your offer and your targets is a key element in the success of your business. Here's how to do it:
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1. Understand Your Offer: Analyze in depth what your product or service really does. What problems does it solve? What unique value do you offer? This understanding will help you communicate the benefits of your offering more effectively.
2. Identify Your Ideal Customers: Determine who your ideal customers are. What are their demographics, specific needs, challenges and pain points? Understanding who they are will enable you to target them more precisely.
3. Analyze Customer Needs: Dive into the needs and concerns of your target customers. What motivates them to buy? What solutions are they looking for? This step is crucial to aligning your offer with their expectations.
4. Tailor Your Message: Once you have a clear understanding of your offer and your customers, tailor your message to resonate with them. Your communication should clearly show how your product or service meets their specific needs.
5. Choose the right prospecting channels: Depending on your target audience, some channels will be more effective than others. For example, LinkedIn may be ideal for B2B, while social networks like Instagram or Facebook may be better suited for B2C.
6. Establish tracking metrics: Define key indicators to measure the effectiveness of your prospecting strategy. This could include conversion rate, cost per acquisition or return on investment.
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By aligning your prospecting strategy with what you offer and with the specific needs of your target customers, you maximize your chances of success. This targeted, personalized approach builds stronger, more productive relationships with your prospects.
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Choose Your Prospecting Tools
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Selecting the right prospecting tools is essential to maximizing the effectiveness of your efforts. It's important not to overload your process with too many tools, but rather to choose those that complement and reinforce your strategy. Here are some key tools to consider:
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Humanlinker:
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• Humanlinker is a valuable tool for entrepreneurs looking to target and personalize their prospecting approach. It enables you to quickly identify the most relevant prospects, providing detailed information on their professional profiles, motivations and interests.
• Using Humanlinker, you can generate personalized messages that resonate with your prospects, increasing the chances of conversion and building more meaningful relationships.
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Refer.social:
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• Refer.social is a powerful tool for expanding your network and finding key contacts in your industry. It helps you identify the best people to connect with potential prospects, investors or partners, facilitating targeted and relevant introductions.
• Using Refer.social can considerably speed up the networking process, giving you access to a wider and more qualified network of contacts, which is essential for effective prospecting.
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By integrating tools like Humanlinker and Refer.social into your prospecting arsenal, you can not only streamline your lead generation process, but also improve the quality of your interactions. These tools enable you to focus on creating authentic, lasting relationships with your potential customers.
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Prospecting methods
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🥱 The old method:
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Using mass automation tools on LinkedIn and sending the same message to thousands of people. While this may generate a few appointments, the impact on your reputation and low return rates (around 2%) make this method ineffective.
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Benefits ✅:

• Time efficiency: Reaches large numbers of people quickly.
• Low Effort: Reduces manual work thanks to automation.

Disadvantages ❌:

• Low Personalization: Lack of personalization in messages.
• Reputation impact: Risk of damaging your professional image through messages perceived as spam.
• Low response rates: Generally low response rates due to generic approach.

👨🏼‍💻The traditional method:
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Doing everything manually is time-consuming and difficult to manage in the daily life of an entrepreneur.
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Benefits ✅:

• High level of personalization: Enables a highly personalized, targeted approach.
• Quality Relationship Building: Promotes the development of stronger, more authentic relationships.

Disadvantages ❌:

• Very time-consuming: Requires considerable time and effort.
• Less effective on a large scale: Difficult to implement for a large number of prospects.
• Can Be Exhausting: Can lead to burnout due to workload.
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💙 The new method:
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Using technologies like Humanlinker changes the game. It allows you to :

• Quickly define your targets.
• Receive referrals from potential customers.
• Access already enriched contacts.
• Obtain a complete analysis of each company and contact.
• Generate personalized messages in seconds.
• Receive daily action recommendations based on the evolution of your targets and signals of key events.
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Benefits ✅:

• Increase your performance tenfold, with appointment booking rates of up to 30%.
• Efficiency and personalization: Combines the efficiency of automation with a personalized approach.
• Time saving: Save time with intelligent automation and lead pre-selection.
• High Response Rates: Improve response rates with targeted, relevant messages.
• Easy management: Simplifies prospect management and follow-up.
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Disadvantages ❌:

‍You won't be able to do without us 🙂

By following these steps and adopting the right methods, small businesses can turn their prospecting challenges into meaningful opportunities, leading to sustained growth and renewed success.