Commercial prospecting: the secret to successful growth

In B2B commercial prospecting, Growth Hacking has become a must for several years to generate growth, for French, European and American companies.

Commercial prospecting has always existed for companies with a B2B sales cycle.

But it has seen a real revolution for almost 10 years thanks to the development of Growth Hacking.

What is Growth Hacking?

Hacking to grow: That's the definition of Growth Hacking. It is therefore the mastery of all academic marketing techniques that makes it possible to achieve strong growth as quickly as possible with low costs.

It is not an isolated skill; rather, Growth Hacking is a set of marketing skills. However, they are accompanied by a particular state of mind. It is based on a simple idea: growth does not occur naturally, it is the result of systematic and methodical work. This field requires a solid understanding of data, a desire to learn and to experiment. That is not all, knowledge must also be constantly updated.

The best weapon for successful commercial prospecting

The creation of No-Code tools to generate very high quality data has greatly developed. At a point where Growth Hacking has become the favorite weapon of the best salespeople because they:

— Optimize their time.

— Certain thankless tasks associated with prospecting are avoided.

— Focus only on the tasks where they have the most added value.

The history of Growth Hacking in commercial prospecting

To fully understand the evolution of Growth Hacking in business development, you need to understand how it developed in B2B sales cycles.

At the beginning of the 2010s...

In 10 years, prospecting methods have completely evolved. In the early 2010s, prospecting was mainly done by telephone. It was achieved a lot through meetings at fairs and events. It was during these years that cold mailing and automated prospecting on LinkedIn began to explode.

Cold mailing has been able to adapt, automated prospecting on LinkedIn has completely crashed in less than 2 years. Moreover, as a reminder to everyone, “at the time”, the limit of adding new prospects on LinkedIn was enormous. There were around 500 additions per week, or 2000 per month. 🤯

And at that time, very few people were prospecting on the app this way. It was El Dorado until everyone realized it. That's how LinkedIn updated its quotas to regulate all this.

With relevant tools to optimize its operation, cold mailing has left direct mail and other mass prospecting “techniques” behind. (For marketers, direct mail is the Windows 38 version of Lemlist 😅)

Nowadays...

Then, we saw content production and influence marketing explode the growth of many businesses. In B2B, with the evolution of automated prospecting (often poorly controlled), prospects have turned to the Google search bar. They therefore preferred the approach of looking for the information by themselves, no longer knowing who to trust.

In fact, they trusted those who were producing content. In B2C, influencers are beginning to allow brands, over a short period of time, to have good results. We are talking here about making 2/3 of their monthly turnover by appearing in a story on their social networks. This has recently started to work in B2B as well.

In recent years, cold mailing has regained a very strong place in the development of company turnover thanks to the search for “intent”. Marketing intent is simply a prospect's intention to buy 🎯

What to remember about commercial prospecting

With the multitude of information and data collected on the internet, we can personalize our campaigns. Very powerful tools now allow you to create emailing campaigns based on intent or insight (very strong similarity between your prospects). Thanks to Growth Hacking, commercial development has seen a real revolution. Sales representatives, entrepreneurs and business developers have all had to digitize their processes.

To come back to the definition of the term “Growth Hacking”, it is the act of hacking your growth via commercial and marketing levers. The objective is to focus on the income that these methods will bring. For curious people who want to know more, go to our LinkedIn page or in the tab blog at the top of the page.

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