prospects - Better Closer

Stop Collecting and Start Processing

June 11, 2010 By Bill Rice

HALLATROW, UNITED KINGDOM - DECEMBER 12: Book...

Making new friends is hard. There’s a lot of anxiety in that first interaction. Will they like me? Do we have anything in common? Will I like them? How do I start things off?

I know, this is a blog about sales. Stay with me. We’ll get there.

The result of all this anxiety is that we often wait around for just the right moment, endlessly search or wait for someone to introduce us, or worse…simply avoid the introduction.

The result? No introduction, no new friendship, no new experience, missed opportunity for you and the new friend.

I develop customer relationships much like I build friendship. And the pitfalls are all the same.

So, now back to sales and what this little story illustrates.

The Amount of Stuff is Exploding

The Internet and social media has caused the amount of stuff you can collect on a people and companies to explode. You can literally lose hours of time running down all the rabbit holes people and companies create with their online behavior.

This is very dangerous to your sales performance.

All this stuff becomes a dangerous placebo for your sales anxiety. And just like a placebo, when you get right down to the real results you’re still sick (no sales).

Discipline Your Collecting

To avoid this peril I recommend disciplining your collecting or pre-sales research. A few of the tricks I use:

1. Follow the guideposts - Chances are your prospect is directing you to where they want your attention. These are the places and things they want you to know about them. You’re not a gotcha entertainment reporter. Stop researching like you’re trying to uncover a secret.

2. Get the basics - You don’t need research and find out all the details of a prospect’s life back to grade school. Not only is that a waste of time, but it’s going to freak your prospect out if you start ask them why they got a C in Art back in third grade. Leave some room for discovery at your first meeting.

3. You only need a couple of themes - You want to be as natural and free-flowing as possible when you start up a new relationship. However, it’s nice to have a couple of themes or commonalities that you can pull out of your hip pocket if you’re losing attention. But, you only need a couple–so get them and then stop.

Start Processing (GTD-style)

Hopefully, I have saved you time and made your stack of prospect research much smaller. Now the most important part: Start processing.

I think GTD for Sales. Nothing closes without contact. Be confident you have enough to start a conversation and start processing through your leads.

Your turn. This post was just a starting point. I know we all suffer from this endless collecting pitfall in sales. Help me and others…

What are your tips and tricks on knowing when to stop collecting and start processing?

Filed Under: Lead Management Tagged With: gtd, lead mangement, prospects, Social Selling

Google for Online Sales Prospecting

May 10, 2010 By Bill Rice

Bettercloser.com - Sales Prospecting with Google

Web 2.0 has delivered an incredibly valuable resource to every sales person on the planet–a massive customer database. Think about it.

Daily people (prospective customers) are creating profiles, indicating their preferences, discussing their pain, and describing their vision. Really, what’s left in the sales process? Connecting with them and building a trusted relationship. Actually, social networking assists in that too. These tools show you pathways to connection and trust.

The trick is learning to efficiently mine this amazing database.

Most people use Google by typing in a couple of keywords into the Google.com search box. Typically, this returns thousands of results filled with companies or websites competing for these top spots. Of course, there isn’t a single prospect to be had in these results.

Frustrated, we end our pursuit. Let me show you the secret to finding prospects with Google.

Finding Prospects with Google

It’s all about looking for your ideal sales scenario. Here is the worksheet that I use to organize those thoughts. As you fill in this tool with keywords keep two things in mind:

We are searching conversations and discussions. Use simple words.
Use keywords appropriate to the power levels you are searching.

I’ll illustrate my point.

If I am looking to find network engineers solving problems (pain) then I’m likely to find things like, “those damn developers love SOAP, but all I get is transactional errors all day.” If I want to find customers revealing pain I might find, “Match.com’s website is down again. This is not helping my dating.” Finally, if we are looking for C-Level folks I might find, “Virtualization is going to be the buzz topic at our presentation to the Morgan Stanley investor conference.”

Your keyword worksheet should reduce your ideal sales scenario down to conversational and level appropriate keywords.

Understanding Different Content Types

The next step is to consider content types and sites you might be targeting. Here is my simple strategy guide to dissecting content types Google indexes (thanks to Google’s new sidebar this is very easy to slice and dice):

News: This is where you can find the latest on market trends, companies, and people as they are covered in press releases and news outlets. I have found these types of searches best for giving me prospecting campaign themes, not necessarily prospects themselves.

Blogs: Searching through blog content is important on two accounts. One, they are typically authoritative or thought leading content. They draw in a community of prospects researching solutions (i.e., potential customers), which means you should be hanging around here too. And two, these blogs are likely to shape your prospects’ perceptions of the “right” solution or best practices. It’s best you are prepared for these perceptions.

Updates: This is a relatively new content type for Google to index, it is the real-time Web results (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and more to come). These results are rich with real-time pain–customers complaining and companies responding. You are likely to find targets of opportunity in this content.

Discussion: The secret hide-out of all experts. Niche discussion groups and forums are where all the experts hang-out and help friends and trusted colleagues. Google does a pretty nice job of indexing most of these treasure troves. Discussion searches are filled with new initiative and complex problems being hashed out. Plugging in your expertise can yield a steady flow of new prospects.

Understanding and segmenting the various content types Google indexes can dramatically improve the efficiency of your online prospecting campaigns.

Creating Prospecting Campaigns

The final step in prospecting online is taking all of this brainstorming and turning it into a productive search query. Each of these queries should be narrowed and focused into a targeted campaign of potential opportunities.

Here’s a quick example of finding market opportunities and themes for your campaigns:

Here’s an example of how to use Linkedin and Google together to target people:

Do you have any favorite online sales prospecting techniques?

Filed Under: Featured, Social Media, Social Selling Tagged With: campaign, Google, linkedin, prospects, social selling

Snag Customers By Letting Prospects Go

November 13, 2009 By Bill Rice

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Let me start by saying that if you are trying to land big accounts there is no one better to listen to than Jill Konrath.

Jill Konrath, Author of Selling to Big Companies

I recently reread Selling to Big Companies (affiliate link) and I am amazed at the contrast between Ms. Konrath and the average sales recipes books stuffing the stacks at the local bookstore. She strips away the average and gets you to think specific, but remarkable in you approach to landing better deals.

Lead Nurturing, Get Prospects Back By Letting Go

Konrath gives us another gem with this “true story” on how she got a non-responsive prospect to reengage with her “let them off the hook” strategy.

I love this story because it highlights an objection we rarely acknowledge and overcome–the “this isn’t a priority” objection. Konrath gives us a clever little tactic to flush out the ones that are interested, but where the pain for the solution has not quite bubbled up to the top.

Sending a quick email letting them know that it is obvious this is not a current priority, but you are available when it becomes one could be the right spark to revive the conversation.

How to Write Great Emails

This is just one example of how Konrath creatively thinks about using communication techniques to motivate prospect response.

Selling to Big Companies

Her ideas on crafting better performing emails is one of my favorite sections of Selling to Big Companies (affiliate link). That section alone will return your $11.00 (probably in the first day).

Other Sales Tips for Non-responsive Prospects?

I am sure you all have other tricks and tips you use to re-warm cold leads. What are they?

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Filed Under: Email Marketing, Social Selling Tagged With: email, lead nurturing, prospects, Social Selling

Cold Calling, The Real Sales Skill

August 25, 2009 By Bill Rice

: Image via Wikipedia

I, like most sales people, avoid talking about cold calling.

It is the ugly, nasty, important core of our business. We hate it (Or should we? More in a minute) and our prospects hate it (Can we fix that?). And I spend a ton of time writing about a million ways to make every call less of a cold call, like using Facebook and FriendFeed for sales leads.

Loving Cold Calling

But, I ran across this great little article from Sales Machine on BNET–Top Sales Pros Really Love Cold Calling. Guess what? He’s right!

I remember back in the day at Quicken Loans one of the highlights of motivating our sales teams was what we called Live Sales Events. These were simple…Sales Managers hoping on the phone with their teams listening in. Of course, the motivation was the competition to see whose manager performed the best on those cold calls.

One last point before we leave the example. Not only did the teams love it, so did the managers–that’s how they got there!

Why is Cold Calling Important?

Why does everyone avoid the topic of cold calling or act like it is something to be avoided? Because it is hard!

(Secret: And telling people things are hard doesn’t sell books or “Get Rich Quick” eBooks)

The number one failure I see in sales performance is phone anxiety. People are afraid of failure and cold calling (sales in general) is full of it.

Legend has it (I don’t know for sure) that one of Chris Gardner’s (The Pursuit of Happyness) tricks for success was to never cradle the phone. By never putting down the phone he was forced to dial one number after the other–never time for doubt to creep in. He learned to love cold calling. He learned how to pursue “happyness.”

How Do You Learn to Love Cold Calling?

I’m not sure you do. But, it is the key to success.

You can get better at attracting an audience. You can find better ways to target your message towards the right people. You can figure out more efficient ways to hit those right people with that message.

However, until you learn to love picking up the phone and making a connection with someone you will never be great in sales.

Do you love cold calling? Do you love helping people? Can you make people interested in hearing your voice?

Practice it.

Tell me how you do it…leave me a comment.

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Filed Under: Contact Management Tagged With: cold calling, contact, prospects, social selling, telemarketing