Deals are won and lost in discovery. 

No pressure. 

If you qualified your prospect properly, you should already know they’re a good fit. Now, you need to use the discovery call to dive deep into their pain, processes, and find out who the decision makers are. 

And who they’re looking at besides you. 

Like we said, no pressure. 

It’s a lot to cover in one call, but failure to gather all this vital info could see you lose out to another hungry AE, even if yours is the better product. 

Feeling that pressure yet? (If not, what’s your secret, Iceman!?)

We make software for salespeople, so we know how hard it is to extract all the information you need without turning the conversation into an interrogation.

We reached out to real live sales professionals to see how they handle this critical stage. Based on those conversations, we’ve put together a checklist to help you run better discovery and boost your chances of moving prospects forward to the next stage.

An inbox is not just where your prospects spend 28% of the workday. It’s an opportunistic hub for connections, rapport building, and, if you nail your cold email outreach, a healthy-looking pipeline.

But a good sales email is like a really good blind date. When a true connection has been made, it’s serendipitous and natural. And if it doesn’t feel right? It ends up feeling awkward, or worse, sleazy.

If anything, a good sales email should open doors, not close them.

Luckily, getting on the right side of the track is doable, but only if you’re thoughtful in your approach. 

In this handy guide, you’ll learn how to write sales emails that engage your prospects and actually get replies.

The sales discovery process is an essential step in learning how you can bring value to your potential customers. But all too often, in a hurry to get to the demo, it’s rushed through as part of qualification or even skipped altogether. 

Biiiig mistake.

As Jacco van der Kooij, says, “Prescription without diagnosis is malpractice,” and this couldn’t be more true in sales. 

Trying to pitch a product without first understanding prospect pain or how they’ll use your solution is a crutch that lower-performing salespeople lean on way too heavily. A crutch that will come back to bite you when prospects drop out of the sales cycle without buying. Or worse, sign up, find the product doesn’t meet their needs, cancel the contract at the first opportunity, and badmouth you on review sites. 

“Everyone is in a rush today to get to the punch-line,” says Vincent Burruano, President of Vince Burruano Consulting Services, “Successful selling requires a time investment.”

How can you avoid these pitfalls?

Too many salespeople waste valuable time and resources going after leads that are unlikely to convert. 

Which hampers your teams’ ability to hit quota.   

However, asking just a few sales qualification questions can ensure you place more high-quality opportunities in your pipeline. 

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople so we know how important (and hard) it is to maximize the chances of sales prospecting success. 

We reached out to salespeople on our team and in our network to sales qualification best practices. Read on to understand:

If prospecting to small and medium-sized businesses is an uphill struggle at times, enterprise sales prospecting is like making the ascent of Everest. You still need a lot of the same gear, but breaking into complex multinationals takes military planning and precision that goes far beyond the prospecting strategies that serve for landing SME customers.

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople so we’re used to listening to the challenges they face when cracking large accounts, and devising tools to help them achieve their objectives.

Getting a response to sales prospecting emails was never easy, but since early 2020 the volume of emails people receive has skyrocketed. Now, prospects are so overwhelmed that it’s impossible for them to read everything that lands in their inbox.

This means you need to change up your email outreach tactics to get a response.

Before, you could blast off a quick product summary and ask for a meeting.

Not any more.

Now, the mission for sales professionals (whether they choose to accept it or not) is to connect with prospects as individuals and survive “inbox triage.”

And do it all at scale. 

With this in mind, we reached out to LinkedIn sales influencers and our own SDRs to find out what makes a great sales prospecting email, and which sales prospecting email templates get results. 

Quick poll: 

💀 Cold calling is deader than the Dodo. 

💪 Cold calling is alive and kicking.   

🧟 If cold calling is dead, I need a badge that says “Zombie Team Leader” cause my sales reps are still smiling and dialing like there’s no tomorrow.     

Cold calling is, of course, far from dead, but it certainly ain’t getting any easier. Nobody likes being interrupted at the best of times, and today’s prospects are so overwhelmed that all they want is to hang up and get back to their to-do list asap. 

Ask the wrong questions and they’ll shut the conversation down faster than you can say “Can I interest you in a demo?” 

Keeping them on the line long enough to share your vision of the bright future that awaits them (and, more importantly, book the next meeting) requires asking open-ended sales prospecting questions to keep the conversation going. And unless you possess the conversational skills of David Letterman, you’ll need to have a few prepared in advance. 

We checked out what leading sales influencers are saying about cold calling, and the techniques they use to get prospects to open up. 

Over 3 billion emails were sent daily last year*. 

That’s a communication tsunami. 

If that stat leaves you feeling overwhelmed, imagine how your prospects feel, drowning in their overflowing inbox each morning as your sales email bobs about among the flotsam of their ever-growing to-do list. 

Standing out from the inbox crowd these days means ramping up your game when it comes to writing sales prospecting email subject lines.

Time was, lines like “Sales inquiry” or “Request for a meeting” might have actually landed you a meeting 😱. Now, anything too salesy will get you cast into the 7th level of inbox hell (the spam folder) faster than you can say “Got 15 minutes to talk this week?” 

At Mixmax, we have to admit to having a slight advantage: We sell to salespeople, so our prospects know where we’re coming from. But that doesn’t mean our hard-working sales reps don’t rack their brains daily to come up with engaging subject lines.  

To give them (and you) a helping hand, we reached out to sales influencers and prepared a lifesaving list of email subject lines for sales prospecting that should help boost your email open rates

B2B sales prospecting has come a long way from the days of smile-and-dial.

Without the right software, getting results these days involves walking a long hard road paved with time-consuming manual tasks. And putting the hours in to get to know your prospects, build relationships, and establish yourself as the go-to provider of solutions. 

This means you need some tried and tested strategies as your road map.  

What’s that you say? Can we recommend any? 

You read our minds.  

We make software for the toughest, most clued-up B2B prospects going: sales professionals. So we asked our own hardworking prospectors how they tackle that herculean task.

Sales prospecting and lead generation are both designed to fill your sales pipeline with potential customers. But they’re not the same thing.

So what’s the difference? 

Good question.  

Talk to a lot of people and you’ll end up more confused than before, as they’re often used interchangeably. 

It’s important to get it right, though, as the right process for your company depends on your product, customer base, stage of growth, and more. 

Get it wrong and you could be wasting valuable time and resources. 

We asked our top prospectors to clear up the differences between sales prospecting vs lead generation.