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 how to greatly increase your prospecting odds without an introduction. This approach is all about “social proximity” as Jamie Shanks calls it.
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In my last post I went through the math on traditional cold calling.
There’s an alternative way to get meetings with prospective clients, but sales people don’t generally use it. Oddly enough they often do use it when they need a job and in this case they call it “networking”. I had to come up with a cool name for using networking in sales so I call it “social calling”.
Whatever you call it, I think the math on the effectiveness of a networking approach vs. a cold calling approach is pretty interesting…
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When I started selling technology I was told to get to the office at 8AM so I could cold call CIOs and catch them before their assistants came in.
When I did succeed in catching a CIO on the phone (one in say 50 dials) they nearly all dismissed me as a time waster. In fact, looking back on my efforts, I agree with them. I was a time waster.
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I am the Chairman Emeritus of the Wharton Club of New York. I’ve been the president and the chairman. Over the years these titles have been very useful for my various business and sales endeavors.
Probably not surprising as that Wharton word carries some credibility and I’ve found having the title president or chairman of the largest alumni association for the school has some credibility too. [Read more…]
We sales people have evolved.
We don’t always pitch our product or service, sometimes we’re helpful enough to send over a white paper or blog post that may be of interest.
But as it goes with good ideas, content is getting overused. [Read more…]
Back in the day when I was selling technology to banks I used my social selling approaches to get a meeting with a super-senior executive in a super-large bank (you know it, but I can’t tell you which one on a blog post.)
It turned out this super-senior executive was a very nice bloke and I stayed in touch for many years. What actually happened when I called though is a I spoke to his assistant. So in reality I actually stayed in touch with his assistant–maybe more than I did with him. [Read more…]