Three Inbound Prospecting processes
The three most common prospecting processes are:
- Nurtured: Prospects from the contact database have been “cookied.” When they visit your website and download content, they gain “points.” Once they achieve a certain “nurture value” or “lead score” based on those points, your sales platform generates an inbound lead. This process is heavily skewed to whether the lead downloads a white paper or signs up to a webinar. We recommend that a nurtured lead should also be fed into the outbound process.
- Alerted: An alert on the website (most commonly: contact sales, request demo) generates an inbound lead. The development rep needs to follow up promptly and schedule a discovery call. With this type of lead, all the development rep has to say is “How may I help you?”
- Word of Mouth (WoM): A new customer hears about you via word-of-mouth. These are the hottest leads! And they need to be properly managed, which means sometimes they should go straight to the Account Executive (AE) for selling (see The SaaS Sales Method: The Science and Process of Sales).
Most relevant during:
PMF phase
GTM Fit phase
Scale phase
Most relevant for:
ACVs < $15K
ACVs $15K-$50K
