The debate about whether sales tactics like cold calling are an effective use of time these days will probably wage on for some time. Personally, I don’t get why sales managers and sales people cling to the idea that calling (or emailing) a list of strangers works. If you are keeping up with trends in sales, there are numbers of studies that confirm that buyers will not call back or respond to email from strangers. As colleague Trish Bertuzzi put it, it isn’t the calling that’s the problem, it is the cold.
I started selling professionally about 29 years ago. In the early days, our ability to do research on our prospects was pretty limited. There was no internet to surf, so we turned to libraries. Remember libraries, those brick buildings full of books? I don’t even recall what the books were called anymore but we’d pull these business data books off the shelf to try and dig up as much information as we could before making the call. At least I did. I’ve never been into cold calling and never will be.
Fast forward to 2012.
What information can’t you find in the blink of an eye? This is why I do not understand why more sales people do not leverage information to their advantage. How hard is it to take a few minutes to peruse the website, blog or LinkedIn profile of your prospect before you call them? The answer is that it isn’t. And with business intelligence tools like InsideView, you can uncover even more in-depth intel about the company and the people that you are targeting.
Countless clients tell me that making a shift in their approach has led to significant increases (somewhere around 50-60%) in their ability to secure meetings with their prospects. All they did differently was to approach the call or email from the viewpoint of the prospect. When you focus on what is important to them – and that takes do a wee bit of homework – the sales results improve dramatically.
So, get off the lazy train and start doing a little homework before trying to engage your prospect. The results will speak for themselves. Oh, and you’ll kick your competitors backside in the process.
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Know you need to leverage business intelligence but really don’t know how? I can help turn you into an information gathering ninja. Our sales meets social media coaching program will teach you a process you can follow to quickly get at the information that you need. Call me at 404-949-0199 if you’d like to learn more.