Roy Reif
Proven B2B prospecting strategies to connect with decision-makers and grow sales.
B2B prospecting is harder than ever. Sales teams and leaders know it. And the data backs it up: Two out of three sales reps are no longer hitting their sales goals.
While the alarm bells have been ringing for a while, the problem persists. You can’t solve the real problem of generating a consistent sales pipeline until your team moves past out-of-date sales prospecting strategies.
Traditional sales playbooks are dead. They’ve served sellers well, but your sales strategies from 2015 are now a decade old. If you want your team to be successful today, you need to throw those old playbooks away.
The next generation of B2B prospecting revolves around the intelligent use of AI sales tools and personalized video. The name of the game creating alignment between each go-to-market function: sales, marketing, and customer success.
This guide will help you navigate the sales trenches. You’ll learn how to reshape your B2B prospecting to deliver maximum impact and hit your goals.
We’ll dive into what effective prospecting looks like, dig into proven outreach methods, and explore modern prospecting tools—like AI SDRs—that can help your team prospect smarter and convert more leads.
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Contents
- What is B2B prospecting?
- The 6 most common B2B prospecting methods (and how to update them)
- Types of B2B prospects: Who you should be looking for
- It’s time to transform your prospecting
What is B2B prospecting?
B2B prospecting is the process of identifying and engaging with potential customers while building trust and educating them about how you can help solve their problems.
Generally, this is the role of sales development reps (SDRs), but every B2B sales team looks a bit different. Overall, the goal of prospecting is to fill the top of your sales funnel with qualified leads that the team can close.
Key components of B2B prospecting include:
- Researching target accounts
- Reaching out via sales channels (like cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Qualifying prospects based on a certain set of criteria
- Engaging and building relationships with prospects
- Scheduling sales demos
- Ensuring data accuracy in sales tools like your CRM
Sales teams may be handed a target account list, especially if they’re utilizing account-based marketing, or may have to come up with a list of prospects on their own. Regardless of how they find companies that could become customers, having a plan of action is critical.
Why is B2B prospecting important and how AI is changing the game
You may be selling the best and most competitively priced product in the world. But if no one knows about it, does it really matter? If you don’t have a regular inflow of qualified leads feeding a consistent sales pipeline, your business is dead in the water.
If your team is still relying on the “spray and pray” method of prospecting, like reaching out to anyone and everyone possible, you’re doing damage to both your sales team’s morale and your brand’s reputation.
Most teams have moved beyond this tactic. Instead, they’re using data to identify prospects, such as B2B contact data, lead enrichment data, and intent data. This type of information can help you find potential customers who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP), but it can’t do the work of building trust, educating stakeholders, and closing the deal.
Even with the best data, SDRs still struggle with prospecting.
Common prospecting pitfalls include:
- Not understanding their ideal customer profile and individual buyer personas
- Low-value prospecting activities and time-consuming manual research
- Bad data, including contact information or technographics
- Low response rates from cold outreach efforts
- Reps having to craft personalized outreach manually
- Not using the best sales prospecting tools
- Not focusing on the right prospecting metrics
- Unclear on how to optimize existing outbound prospecting
Here’s the good news: Lots of tools have sprung up to solve these problems. In particular, today’s sales teams now have an entire generation of AI sales tools at their disposal.
AI-enhanced prospecting helps teams overcome or even completely avoid the above pitfalls by:
- Automatically finding and prioritizing qualified prospects that match buyer personas
- Performing lead scoring and routing to streamline qualified leads
- Generating personalized outreach at scale (including through personalized video messages using AI avatars)
- Providing sales enablement content recommendations throughout the sales process
- Scheduling and recording meetings with automated transcription and suggested next steps
But now the bad news: Artificial intelligence can’t solve all your problems, especially if you aren’t using the right methods and strategy.
Next, we’ll walk you through the modern world of B2B prospecting methods, tactics, and strategies that today’s best sales teams are using to set new records.
The 6 most common B2B prospecting methods (and how to update them)
Just like the old sales playbooks, traditional B2B prospecting methods are due for a serious update.
Let’s break down the six most-used sales prospecting techniques—with ideas for how to leverage new tactics and tools (like agentic and generative AI) to make them shine in your prospecting efforts.
1. Cold email outreach
If you’ve never sent a cold email, have you even prospected? Cold email outreach is an outbound sales strategy that involves sending targeted, personalized emails to prospects who may (or may not be) familiar with your brand.
It’s a tried-and-true method of B2B prospecting. It’s easy to use and to scale. Nearly every sales team uses it to initiate contact with prospects,
But just because virtually every team does it, that doesn’t mean they’re using this channel in the best way possible. You’ve probably received your fair share of copy-paste “I hope this message finds you well” cold emails that fall flat.
How to enhance cold email outreach
Research shows sales people can get up to 92% more replies than traditional emails using one simple trick: Personalized video.
Recording and sending a personalized video message to every single prospect sounds like something that takes up a lot of time. But tools like Vidyard’s AI Avatars make it just as easy as sending that templated cold email. You can create digital avatars of your team members, then use those avatars to generate personalized sales pitches for each and every prospect.
2. Cold calling
Cold calling is possibly the most classic b2b sales prospecting tactic. And in the digital age, it is also a dying art. Cold calling involves direct phone outreach to potential prospects.These days 80% of cold calls go to voicemail. So how do you make sure you’re making the most of these touch points?
How to enhance cold calling
Sales pros can pair a cold call with a follow-up video message via email to smooth out the introduction process. When the prospect sees the video, they match the voice on the phone to the person on screen. That initial two-minute call lays the groundwork for building face-to-face trust with the prospect.
And with AI, you can scale up those cold call follow-up messages. Your team can use tools like Vidyard’s AI Avatars to effortlessly generate and send a tailored video to accompany each voicemail—helping lead to more prospect interest and more call-backs.
3. Social selling via LinkedIn prospecting
LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B lead generation, given its focus on professional networking. Sales teams can target specific industries and job titles, especially if they’re using Linkedin Sales Navigator, making it easier to connect with the right decision-makers.
How to enhance LinkedIn social selling
You can freshen up this B2B sales prospecting method by going beyond the standard InMail. Focus on delivering personalization outside of the prospect’s LinkedIn profile. Spend less time pitching your solution and more time having genuine conversations about the problems the prospect faces.
4. Referral programs
Referrals leverage existing partner and customer relationships to expand your reach on a foundation of mutual trust. Referrals can shorten sales cycles and improve close rates because trust is transferred from the referrer to you.
Whether you launch a full-blown, incentive-backed referral program or reps shop for referrals on their own, they’re a great way to expand opportunities and hit sales quotas. This strategy is great for companies who have strong industry connections or are looking to grow new customers and new business in new verticals.
How to enhance referral programs
In order to secure a referral, there needs to be a certain level of trust between a rep and a customer. You can supercharge any referral program by attaching video to it. Sending video messages reinforces that sense of trust by showing the seller behind the screen.
5. Events
Events can be an amazing revenue driver for your business if you have a solid strategy in place for what to do with the lead list you receive after the show.
They allow for a practically unparalleled level of personal rapport-building, load up marketing pipeline, and significantly accelerate the sales process.
How to enhance events
Think outside the box when it comes to events—whether it’s a happy hour, networking event, or major trade show.
If you don’t have the budget to sponsor, try to get a speaking opportunity instead. If that doesn’t work out, you can host a private dinner for prospects you expect to be in attendance. (LinkedIn is a great way to find this information.)
Sending a personalized video message can help your team connect with attendees before, during, and after any event.
- Pre-event outreach: Send short videos to introduce yourself to prospects before an event and schedule meetings on-site.
- At-event content: Record and share event highlights for post-event follow-ups and long-term sales enablement. Make a splash on social media by posting behind-the-scenes content and recapping takeaways from sessions that others may have missed.
- Lead capture and nurture: Collect contact information from attendees, then promptly follow up with personalized video messages that reference event-specific discussions. Use tools like Vidyard’s AI Avatars to automate the process of sending these videos, making it even easier on your jet-lagged reps.
6. Marketing automation
Marketing’s job is to create interest in your company’s brand and products through strategic content, advertising, and promotion. If someone downloads an ebook, attends a webinar, or signs up for your newsletter, there’s a good chance they can become a qualified prospect.
How to enhance marketing automation
If your sales and marketing teams aren’t connected, members of your target audience could be getting lost in the shuffle. Platforms like Salesforce and Hubspot can integrate workflows to link marketing activities to your sales data. This gives both teams a clear view into how each potential customer is interacting with your brand.
Other tools, like Vidyard’s Video Agent, can automatically send personalized videos based on buyer actions logged in your CRM or marketing automation platform. When a prospect downloads a content asset, attends a webinar, or books a call, the agent instantly sends a customized message without needing your seller to go on camera and record a video themselves.
Types of B2B prospects: Who you should be looking for
There are two types of prospects: Sales-ready prospects and marketing prospects. They’re both important, but they differ when it comes to how your team should approach them.
Sales prospects: High-quality leads with fast turnaround
Sales prospects are the leads who have shown explicit buying intent, such as filling out a request demo form, visiting your G2 page, or browsing certain parts on your website (like competitor versus pages).
These prospects tend to be decision-makers—or, at least, decision influencers. They often already have a defined budget, timeline, and clear pain points they’re trying to alleviate. Research shows that these prospects are already 50-70% through their buying research when they contact sales.
This means that sales prospects likely know quite a bit about your company and are comparing you to other providers. This is why a fast follow-up and deep engagement are critical for closing deals with these qualified leads.
Marketing prospects: Slow but reliable prospects
Marketing prospects, also known as inbound leads, may not be immediate buyers. They’re interested in your brand’s content, learning resources, and networking opportunities with others facing similar challenges.
These prospects likely discovered your company through a blog post, social media, or a tip-off from someone in their professional or personal network. Marketing prospects likely won’t buy right away, but they likely fit your ideal customer profile and could eventually be in-market.
To build rapport with these prospects, marketing teams often turn to content marketing to develop highly relevant assets that catch attention and build brand authority. Once a prospect engages with this content, such as signing up for a newsletter, it’s a strong sign that they’re developing a connection with your brand.
Think about creative ways to engage your marketing prospects beyond just sales outreach. Maybe this means featuring them in a piece of content, sending a personal invite to a networking event, or sending a personalized video message after they engage with a content piece.
Your goal is to stay top-of-mind with these prospects. When the time comes that they’re shopping for a new provider, they’re more likely to come to you. Your sales team can keep these prospects gently engaged by reaching out on LinkedIn or sharing new content that’s relevant to their interests.
It’s time to transform your prospecting
Potential buyers are overwhelmed by generic vendor outreach. Modern B2B prospecting needs more than just high volume—it must center meaningful, personalized engagement that cuts through the noise.
The most successful go-to-market teams are rolling high-impact techniques (like personalized video engagement) into their prospecting process to stand out and drive results. That’s where Vidyard comes in. Our AI-powered video platform helps more than 100,000 sales teams engage prospects with personal, authentic video messages that they create and deliver at scale. With prospecting tools like AI Avatars and Video Agent, it’s easier than ever for sellers to connect. (Ask the team who saw a 7x increase in prospecting open rates with Vidyard!)
