Contents
1. Create an ideal customer profile
2. Target prospects with budget authority
3. Meet your audience where they already are
5. Send personalised video emails, not plain-text cold emails
6. Build a referral and testimonial engine
7. Consistency beats intensity
8. Automate the right parts of the workflow
9. Be honest about what your product does
10. Build a repeatable sales process
10 Trending Tips for Sales Prospecting
"Ugh, sales prospecting. Don't get me started on sales prospecting." That is probably the most common reaction you will get when asking a salesperson about their prospecting strategy.
Sales prospecting is a sore point for every sales team across every industry. Drawing prospects in is hard. Closing deals is harder. And prospects today are more guarded than ever, often resenting salespeople even when they are just doing their job.
Roughly half of prospects feel salespeople are too pushy, according to HubSpot's research. That is the bar every modern sales prospecting effort has to clear: cut through the noise without making the prospect feel hunted.
The single biggest shift in sales prospecting over the last few years is video. A 60-second personalised video email outperforms a plain-text cold email by a wide margin on response rate. AI avatar videos let one rep run personalised at-scale outreach that used to require a 20-person team. The reps who lead with video in 2026 are pulling away from the ones who do not.
10 modern sales prospecting tips that lean on video to cut through the noise and lower the "pushiness factor" to a minimum.
1. Create an ideal customer profile
Most sales teams stretch themselves too thin trying to cover every potential customer in their market. The fix: a tight ideal customer profile (ICP).
Look at your previous wins. Who closed fastest? Who paid the largest deal sizes? Who became a long-term customer? If you are new and have no closed deals yet, look at your industry peers and study who their best customers are.
Narrow your prospecting target. Who is the right person for your product? Who benefits most from partnering with you? When a prospect matches the criteria, that is your ICP. Focus your video outreach there instead of casting a wide net and hoping for the best.
A recurring customer often spends meaningfully more than a new one (research consistently shows 30% or more), so the ICP investment pays back across the full customer lifecycle.
2. Target prospects with budget authority
Pick prospects you know can actually pay for your services. This sounds obvious, but most reps waste time on enthusiastic contacts who lack the authority or budget to sign.
Target C-level executives and decision-makers with budget authority. These prospects can be intimidating, but they are also the people with the most pressure to improve their business and the clearest authority to act on it. A well-crafted personalised video email to a CMO or CRO often gets a faster response than a 50-email sequence to mid-level contacts.
If you land a C-level conversation, you can have a direct, serious discussion about the partnership without going through layers of approval gates.
3. Meet your audience where they already are
You need to meet your audience where they spend their time. Industry seminars, webinars, conferences, and online communities are all places to find your ICP and start conversations naturally.
You do not need to attend every event. Focus on the ones most relevant to your industry, where the highest concentration of ICP-fit prospects gather. Quality of presence over quantity of presence.
The same applies online. Pick the LinkedIn groups, subreddits, and Slack communities where your prospects already talk shop, and add real value there before you ever pitch.
4. Make yourself easy to find
Finding prospects is essential, but the inverse matters just as much: make sure prospects can find you. Being approached is much warmer than being approached, and a strong inbound presence flips the dynamic.
Social media is the leverage point. Cast a wide net, build community around your product, and let interested prospects come to you.
Pick your platforms carefully. LinkedIn is the gold standard for B2B prospecting. Make sure your profile is fully completed with a professional photo, a clear positioning statement, and recent content that demonstrates expertise. A LinkedIn post embedded with a short product demo video pulls dramatically higher engagement than a plain-text post.
X, Facebook, and YouTube each work for different audiences. Match your platform mix to where your ICP actually spends time, not where it feels easiest to post.
5. Send personalised video emails, not plain-text cold emails
Roughly 29% of marketers rate email as their most effective channel, ahead of social media and SEO. But email prospecting has changed. Plain, salesy, generic cold emails are no longer welcome and frequently get marked as spam, even from brands the prospect engaged with before.
The shift: personalised video emails. A 60-second personalised video introducing yourself, referencing the prospect's specific situation, and previewing how you can help significantly outperforms its plain-text equivalent on open rate, response rate, and meeting conversion. Cold sales emails with video are no longer a novelty. They are the new baseline for serious B2B outreach.
For at-scale personalisation, the AI avatar generator creates human-like presenter videos from text. You write a personalised script for each prospect, the AI generates the video, and you can send hundreds of personalised videos without re-recording each one. The economics shift completely: what used to take a 20-person SDR team can be done by a single rep.
Relevance is the key. Every video email must speak to the specific prospect: their company, their role, their probable pain point. Think of it this way: your prospects have problems that need fixing, and you are the person to help. Approach video outreach with that framing and the response numbers follow.
6. Build a referral and testimonial engine
Word-of-mouth is the highest-converting marketing channel in existence. The vast majority of buyers trust a recommendation, even from a stranger, more than they trust direct outreach.
When you close a deal, ask for a referral. Especially after the customer has had a strong outcome. The referral conversation is dramatically easier when the customer is in the honeymoon phase of their results.
Video testimonials are the highest-leverage form of social proof you can collect. A 60-second video of a satisfied customer talking about results carries far more weight than a written quote on a website. Embed the video in your sales emails, your landing pages, and your follow-up sequences.
7. Consistency beats intensity
Dabbling does not build a sales pipeline. If you are running a video prospecting strategy, run it with consistency for at least a full quarter before assessing results.
The worst thing a sales team can do is change strategy constantly. Pick a video prospecting motion, commit to it for 90 days, and only then evaluate the data. Most reps quit a strategy three weeks before it would have started working.
Consistency does not mean rigidity. If a tactic is clearly underperforming after a full cycle, change it. But base the change on data, not on impatience.
8. Automate the right parts of the workflow
Personalisation matters. So does scale. You cannot personally script every video for every prospect, and you should not try to.
Automation has improved dramatically with modern AI. The smart play is to automate the repetitive parts of the workflow (CRM data entry, follow-up scheduling, video template generation) and reserve human time for the parts that genuinely need a personal touch (the actual one-to-one conversations and the highest-tier prospect outreach).
The script-to-video tool turns written prospect-specific scripts into ready-to-send videos. Combine it with a CRM that auto-pulls prospect data into the script template, and you have a personalised-at-scale video prospecting engine.
Automation done right does not invalidate personalisation. It clears the busywork so the rep can focus on the parts that matter.
9. Be honest about what your product does
Only a small fraction of prospects trust sales reps. That is a defeating starting point, but it does not have to define every conversation you have. The fix is simple: be honest about what your product can and cannot do.
Your product is not a magic solution to every problem. It has shortcomings, edge cases where it does not fit, and competitors who do certain things better. State that openly. Most prospects appreciate the directness and become easier to work with when they know what to expect.
It is far easier to address a known shortcoming during the sales process than to do damage control after the customer discovers it in production. Hidden shortcomings hurt the relationship and the long-term reputation; transparent ones get integrated into the deal terms and the customer's expectations.
10. Build a repeatable sales process
A repeatable sales process is essential. The standard structure: prospecting, preparation, approach, presentation, handling objections, closing, and follow-up. These seven steps form the backbone of every effective sales motion.
A clear process gives the team:
- Better forecasting: Pipeline health becomes predictable when every deal moves through defined stages.
- Internal alignment: Sales, marketing, and customer success teams stay on the same page when the prospect journey is mapped end-to-end.
- Repeatable wins: What worked for the last 10 deals can be replicated for the next 100 when the process is documented.
Video shows up at every stage: video emails in prospecting, product demo videos in presentation, video testimonials in handling objections, and personalised follow-up videos in closing. A video-first sales process is more memorable for the prospect and more efficient for the rep.
Wrapping up
Modern sales prospecting is about personalisation at scale. The reps and teams that figure out how to be personal without burning out are the ones who win. Video is the unlock.
If you want to start running video prospecting at scale, Vmaker covers the full pipeline. Record personalised cold emails with the screen recorder, generate AI avatar videos for at-scale outreach with the AI avatar generator, polish recordings with the AI video editor, add subtitles in 35+ languages, and dub into 100+ languages for international prospecting. Free plan, unlimited recordings, no watermark.
