Proactive Sales: 10 Proactive Sales Techniques to Close More Deals

Turns out it takes more than just reaching out with a confident manner and turning on the charm. In fact, true proactive selling involves a surprisingly complex interplay of factors. It’s a systematic process that anyone can master with the right knowledge and some solid preparation.

Here, we take an in-depth look at what’s involved in proactive selling and why it’s a much more powerful approach than its purely reactive counterpart. We’ll list ten top proactive strategies you can deploy to convert prospects into loyal customers, and give a couple of real-life examples of companies that make it work.

What is proactive sales?

The term “proactive sales” simply refers to the practice of reaching out to potential customers rather than waiting for them to come to you.

That’s a short definition, but there are a number of facets to proactive sales, meaning there’s a variety of approaches you can take. For instance, cold calling would be one example, but it’s not the only one, by any means. 

In fact, the key to getting proactive sales right lies in appreciating the nuances of how to make it work. Pursuing the approach can be a highly effective B2B sales strategy, but it takes more than simply picking up the phone and hoping for the best. 

Done right, proactive selling tends to get much better results than a simple reactive approach. Let’s take a look at why that is.

Reactive sales vs proactive sales: The key differences

As a sales strategy, reactive sales is the equivalent of a store assistant waiting at the checkout for customers to bring them items they want to buy. 

If you’re in B2B sales, that might mean answering email queries from potential clients, processing orders, or even handling customer support issues. The key point is that you’re waiting for the customer to come to you, rather than going to meet them where they are. 

Right away, you can see how this means you don’t control the sales process. You’ll be relying entirely on customers simply turning up, rather than going out and finding them. 

On the other hand, practicing a proactive sales approach puts you firmly in the driving seat. You’ll be able to control the conversation much more effectively, and push through a higher volume of sales as a result. 

Here’s a quick table to compare the differences between proactive sales vs reactive sales:

	Proactive sales	Reactive sales
Basic approach	Sales agent reaches out to customers	Sales agent waits for customers to reach out
Knowledge	Agent uses data-dri ven research collected before approaching prospect	Agent relies on information from prospect
Timeline	Agent controls the timeline according to a preset plan	Prospect controls the timeline
Conversation	Opened and guided by sales agent	Opened and led by prospect

Taking a proactive sales approach: 10 Strategies to try

So far, so good, but how do you make a proactive sales approach work in practice? 

Well, the key is to be well prepared before you even think about starting that conversation with a prospect. Here are ten steps you can take to put yourself in an excellent position when you reach out to a potential client: 

1. Start by doing in-depth research

It all begins with having the relevant data at your fingertips. Your objective at this stage is to learn about and understand your prospective customers’ needs and pain points. That way, you’ll be well placed to discuss how your product can help once you do actually make your approach to a potential client. 

But there’s more you can do. When you have a sales conversation, it tends to flow much better if you can connect with a prospect on a personal level. It can be a good idea to scope out your prospects on social media to find out what their favorite topics and brands are. 

If they’ve already interacted with your company on social media, looking at how those previous conversations went can be a goldmine of information. 

A good starting point at this stage is to use sales intelligence tools to help build up profiles of potential customers. These can also be instrumental in sourcing the contact details you’ll need to make your initial approach.

2. Learn about your target audience's business models

One aspect of this early research you should focus on particularly carefully is getting to grips with the details of your prospects’ business models. This means studying their industry as a whole to develop a clearer understanding of the challenges they face in their day-to-day operations.

In addition, take a look at the competitive landscape in their field. Who are their main competitors? What’s their unique sales proposition? How do they position themselves in their market? 

Taking a big-picture view like this gives you a holistic perspective that can come in useful when thinking about how to tailor your offering to a prospect’s needs.

3. Use customer journey mapping

As part of your proactive sales strategy, you also need to put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. Getting a feel for how your customers experience interacting with your brand and using your product helps you tweak your offering to potential clients. 

This is where customer journey mapping comes in. It’s a systematic procedure that aims to establish a deep understanding of how customers behave, feel, and act throughout the customer journey. 

When sales agents understand how customers move from one stage to the next through the buying process, it gives them crucial insights about how to guide new customers through the same process. 

4. Leverage predictive analytics

One of the most powerful proactive sales techniques is to use predictive analytics to anticipate where the market is going. This is another big-picture approach, and it’s all about spotting developing trends and evolving behaviors so you can take advantage of them before your competitors do.

Predictive analytics is a complex field, but fundamentally, the algorithms involved use historical data in combination with core market indicators. Based on this data, they predict future trends in the market. 

This enables sales teams to allocate their available resources strategically to identify key opportunities in good time. In addition, they’ll be alerted to potential challenges ahead, which means they can prepare for them accordingly.

5. Personalize the outreach

One thing many effective B2B marketing strategies have in common is a focus on personalization. It works because people respond well to attempts to give them a relevant and engaging experience. 

This is important whether you’re a sales agent selling high-end tech solutions or a barista making a coffee just the way your regular likes it. It’s all about the individual. It lets people know that you value them enough to learn what makes them tick, and that’s vital if you hope to make a solid connection from the get-go.

So, when you do make your initial approach, make sure you’re well briefed about your prospect’s individual history and preferences. Tailor the conversation to meet what makes them who they are, and you’ll be much more likely to elicit an enthusiastic response. 

6. Ask open-ended questions

Of course, starting the conversation is only the first step. Actually seeing it through productively is something else entirely. An evergreen sales technique is to ask open-ended questions, since it pushes the conversation forward and encourages the other person to engage. 

What you don’t want is to ask questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” response. For instance, don’t ask something like “are you looking to upgrade your payment solution?” If you do that and the prospect answers “no”, where are you going to go from there? It shuts the conversation down when you’ve barely got started.

Instead, try questions like:

• What are your biggest challenges at the moment?

• What are your top priorities for the next six months?

• Can you tell me about your current process for [task relevant to your product]?

• How important is [specific feature] to you?

Using questions like this makes for a two-way conversation that not only engages the prospect, but also gives you useful information about how to continue it. 

7. Be ready for objections

The road to converting a sale is rarely a completely smooth one. There will be a few bumps and potholes along the way. And when you’re engaging in a sales conversation with a potential client, they’re bound to raise a few objections.

The important thing is to be ready for them. Spend time before you reach out anticipating what those objections might be so that when they crop up, you’ll have an answer ready. 

A simple brainstorming session can be the best way to achieve this. Plan what questions you’re going to ask, then make a list of all the possible responses and objections you can think of. Then, work out the best way of responding to each one. Doing this cuts down on how much thinking you’ll have to do on your feet, so you’ll be well prepared. 

8. Focus on customer success

A proactive sales approach doesn’t end when the client converts. Instead, conversion should just be the starting point of an ongoing relationship.

Building a focus on customer success into your sales process is an excellent way to continue engaging with the customer over time. That means understanding how they use your product and giving them support and additional resources where needed. 

When you do this, it inspires customer loyalty, which forms the robust bedrock of customer retention. It also means you’ll become much more familiar with your customer and their processes, which in turn can unearth further opportunities for cross-selling or upselling in the future. 

9. Build strategic alliances

How about finding other ways to make your offering even more attractive? 

Forming partnerships with other companies that operate in an adjacent sector can be a terrific way of adding more value to your product. 

For instance, some companies that sell niche tech solutions have been able to broaden their target market by collaborating with each other. This works best when the two solutions complement each other and can be integrated to function well in combination out of the box. 

That’s just one example, but building alliances can be an effective proactive sales strategy for any company whose target audience overlaps with another’s. It helps increase reach, creating greater impact thanks to the added value it offers the customer.

10. Ask for feedback

 Finally, remember to ask for feedback whenever possible. A good moment to do this is just after you’ve made a sale. Asking your new customer what made them decide to buy from you gives you crucial information that can help you prepare for future outreach.

Even if you weren’t successful, it’s still a good idea to ask your contact why they decided not to go with your offering. Doing this helps you understand where you can make improvements to your sales approach. 

For feedback to be truly valuable, though, you need to be systematic about collecting it regularly from your current customers. 

If there are any issues with your product or any new features that would be particularly useful for your clients, you’ll find out about them first if you keep your ear to the ground. And when you do get constructive feedback, make sure you have procedures in place to act on it quickly.

Advantages of proactive sales

When you start taking a proactive approach to selling, you’ll immediately notice a number of key benefits. Here are some of the biggest advantages of proactive sales techniques:

Stronger customer relationships

Because you emphasize the importance of laying the groundwork for an ongoing partnership, your relationships with your customers are stronger from day one.

From the very beginning of the sales prospecting process, you’ll be devoting time and effort to truly understanding your customer and their needs. This pays dividends, not only when it comes to converting the sale, but also in terms of fostering a stronger relationship over the long term.

Better customer retention

On a related point, because your relationships with your customers are in excellent standing, they’ll want to stick around. Given how expensive acquiring new customers can be, this is a huge benefit to most companies—particularly ones that operate in a hyper-competitive sector. 

From the outset, selling proactively requires developing an excellent grasp of how to help your customers resolve the challenges they’re facing. When you do this consistently, your clients will know you’ll be on their side whenever they need you. As a result, it’s less likely they’ll take a risk on changing to a provider who might not be as reliable. 

Shorter sales cycles

Refining the sales process so that it proceeds as quickly as possible is a core goal of many sales teams. After all, the faster new customers convert, the better it is for the bottom line. This is why many sales agents favor using tools like automated lead generation software to find suitable contacts. 

That said, the best way of reducing the timescale of the sales cycle is to make sure you’re in charge of the process. And this is where proactive sales techniques win big. That’s because when you reach out to prospects, you control the speed of the conversation as you guide them through the various stages of the sales funnel. 

Competitive advantage

All of these benefits add up to a serious competitive advantage for your company. With proactive sales techniques, you hook potential customers early because you impress them with what you have to offer.

When you put a clear focus on understanding your clients, doing in-depth research into the market, and making the sales conversation happen at your pace, you put your company in a superb position relative to your competitors. After all, you’re offering up a proposition that’s a lot more comprehensive than theirs.

Companies that exhibit proactive sales and marketing techniques

It’s worth examining a couple of examples of companies that have made a proactive sales approach happen in practice. Let’s take a look:

Amazon

Amazon wasn’t always the behemoth it is today. While its phenomenal growth since its launch in the 1990s has happened thanks to a range of factors, its proactive sales approach is definitely one of them.

The key to Amazon’s success is that it’s always been a tech leader. This has enabled it to use sophisticatedtechnology and predictive analytics to fine-tune features like personalized recommendations. It was one of the first to do this in online retail, and it’s no surprise that so many others have copied its sales model since.

Lego

While you might not have been surprised to see Amazon referenced here, maybe Lego is a slightly more unexpected inclusion? Well, the reason it’s here is that it’s a prime example of how proactive selling via strategic partnerships can lead to renewed success.

As a company that had been around for decades (since 1932, in fact), Lego faced a challenge back in the early 2000s. It was over-innovating within its own sphere, and as a result, it was faring badly against tech-forward competitors. A close brush with near-bankruptcy in 2003 forced it to change direction.

It decided upon a new approach that centered on leveraging brand partnerships. Do you have a Harry Potter or Star Wars Lego set somewhere around the house? If you do, you were (perhaps unwittingly) part of Lego’s successful turnaround.

Foster a proactive sales approach with Leadfeeder’s help

Ready to jump into proactive sales so you can supercharge your conversion rates? There’s no better way to get started than with Leadfeeder’s top-tier sales automation software.

Our leading sales solution helps you discover exactly who’s been browsing your website anonymously—and which pages they’ve been looking at. 

What’s more, once you’ve unearthed these key high-intent prospects, you’ll be able to track them down thanks to our comprehensive database of company employees. Our search tool lets you filter by job role, seniority, or location, so you’ll always be able to connect with the right person every time.

You can also keep your team in the loop automatically by enabling Slack or email notifications every time a prospect visits your site. And of course, our tool integrates seamlessly with your CRM so you can assign follow-ups to your team members as required.

So, why not reach out to one of our experts today to learn more about how Leadfeeder can help your company’s sales take off into the stratosphere?

Proactive sales FAQs

What does proactive selling mean?

Proactive selling is the practice of reaching out to potential customers rather than waiting for them to come to you. It encompasses a wide range of elements including carrying out in-depth customer research, monitoring evolving trends in the market, and using personalized strategies to connect with prospects.

What’s an example of a proactive sales approach?

One example of a proactive sales approach would be researching how potential customers use social media. Noting which brands they follow and how they interact with them gives you an excellent starting point for opening an initial conversation.

Can you combine both reactive and proactive selling?

Absolutely! While a core focus on proactive selling is undoubtedly the best way of organizing your sales approach, there will be times when potential customers contact you first. 

But even then, you’ll probably find that your proactive sales approach has had a hand in that as well. For instance, if you land a new customer thanks to a referral, it’s possible they wouldn’t have approached you in the first place unless you’d already impressed the person who recommended you with your proactive mindset.

What role can technology play in proactive sales?

Technology has a massive role to play in proactive sales. For instance, predictive analytics tools can allow you to forecast trends and customer behavior, helping you understand how to connect with prospects. And automated sales prospecting software is indispensable when it comes to finding and contacting high-value leads.