In my last post I was talking about how you can greatly increase your prospecting odds by leveraging people you know for an introduction.

In this post I am going to talk about greatly increasing your prospecting odds without an introduction. I am also going to give you a template you can copy to make this happen.

Typical success rates in getting intros using this approach vary from approximately 1 in 2 to 1 in 5, vs 1 in 100 or 1 in 330 for cold calling. Hence, I think it’s a good approach. [Read more…]

If you’ve read any of my previous posts on this blog you will know that I think relationships determine if you will get a meeting with your prospect.

In this post I’m going to give you a few templates you can copy to help you get referrals to the likely 22,500 people you have available to help you save (and maybe prosper) in your new sales gig.

Typical success rates in getting intros using this approach is approximately 1 in 2, vs 1 in 100 or 1 in 330 for cold calling. Hence, I think it’s a good approach. [Read more…]

In my last post I shone a light on the fact that to prospect you need to have a good prospect list.

In this post, I want to tell you about something that boosts prospecting results: trigger events. A “trigger event” is when something changes in your prospect’s world.

Change is good for you when you’re selling as when something changes in your prospect’s world, it often creates a need. Sometimes that need is something your product can address and hence a sales opportunity is created. [Read more…]

In order to contact prospects you need to have their contact information.

Today’s post is not about rocket science. This is the first post in the more practical area of actually doing this prospecting thing.

During the posts about preparation I told you about getting your prospect profile together. If you did that, you should have a good sense of who you want to contact, including the type of company they work for, where they are located and their typical job title.

Now you need to take that prospect profile and grab actual people’s names, company names, addresses, emails and social media profiles that match it. You want to grab these and put them in a spreadsheet or your handy CRM system. [Read more…]

OK I need to come out of the closet.

In the last two posts I did a bunch of math. I wanted to boil down cold calling vs. social selling data so we could do a somewhat fair comparison. Here’s the punchline. [Read more…]