Sales 2.0

Articles on sales prospecting

Mind the Information Gap

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One thing that makes sales (really) hard is that you lack information on what people need.

Imagine if you knew exactly what every company in your market needed to buy right now in your category. You would sell an amount way beyond any reasonable dreams.

This lack of information causes us to use ham-fisted approaches to prospecting. These ill-informed approaches are working less and less effectively. Buyers simply don’t have the time to deal with salespeople approaching them on topics that are not relevant to their challenges (and job/company survival.)

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Sideways Selling

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The biggest problem most salespeople (and founders that sell) face these days is getting meetings with prospective customers. Metrics for getting meetings have gone way down across the board, whether you use email, a phone call, or a LinkedIn InMail.

There are just too many messages inundating buyers. Buyers know that most of the messages are spam (or close enough), ranging from poorly targeted outreach by salespeople to outright phishing attempts. As a result, buyers want to hit “delete” as quickly as possible.

Many companies (and experts) are tackling this problem by “playing the numbers game”. If only 1 in 100 emails get through now, and that used to be 1 in 10, then we must send 10 times as many emails. This brute force approach has been the answer for more than a decade now, and so conversion numbers keep dropping.

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Help humans meet humans

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“Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first.”—Bob Burg, The Go Giver

Mass outreach continues to get worse. I frequently hear from people that “email does not work” or “how can you cold call people when everyone works at home?”

There are still many people out there who think the answer to this declining effectiveness is to send more outreach. If cold email only gives you a 0.1% reply rate, versus the 1% it used to give, then just send ten times more!

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Buyers are people

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People are people, so why should it be, you and I should get along so awfully–Depeche Mode

During a conversation with a friend who is the CEO of a small professional services firm the question came up “how well do you know this person?” and “do you know them like a real person?”

Looking at these questions on the page, they seem a bit odd. But I’ve found in practice they are not. When we are selling, we tend to project some odd traits onto buyers. We forget that buyers are just normal people.

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Mixed Messages

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It’s darn tough to get through to anyone these days. People have become really good at ignoring what we want to tell them.

I hear this all the time from all kinds of businesspeople and salespeople. Emails don’t work. Calls don’t work. Social media doesn’t work. Nothing works!

But I had an experience this week that reminded me that communication does work when it’s something people want, it’s a little different, and it’s from someone they know.

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Finding leads: Look in your CRM

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I am working on a new sales project and I am sharing what is happening, hoping that it may help you in your selling.

I’ve gotten to the point in this project where I need to start building a list of prospects. I need some quick wins in this project, so I’m looking for ways to leverage companies my client has spoken to before. To find these types of companies I’ve been fishing around in my client’s CRM.

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