You’ve heard this before but how much do you “walk the talk” when it comes to knowing your prospects?
Information is power in sales. The more you know about your prospect and their situation, the more likely you are to make a sale. If you’re in the dark, you’re not likely to bring up the right topics at the right time, and you’re way more likely to get a stack of objections.
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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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You may know I’m a Brit. At the time of this post, the UK government is going through it’s 27th vote on Brexit. (Actually I don’t know how many votes there have been. It’s unlikely anyone could agree on the definition of “vote”.)
I’m involved in helping companies sell more effectively. There is an issue in sales that is a lot like Brexit. It’s super-contentious and you can find people to argue for and against it, and probably have 27 discussions. That issue is cold calling.
When it comes to cold calling I am a “leaver”.
My best rationale for why is based on data. Data on this subject is hard to come by so whenever I see some that seems credible I save it. Here’s what I’ve got so far.
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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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Getting in the door is the #1 problem for most small companies I know.
When I first got involved in sales I was a sales engineer. I supported a technology sales force on their sales calls with semiconductor engineers. I always thought I was pretty amazing. When I got to these meetings I had many engaging conversations with these buyers that our sales team did not seem able to handle.
Their knowledge seemed so “thin” compared to my in depth tech mastery. I wondered “what do these sales guys actually do? Many of them earn more money than me and when I go to these meetings I do all the work.”
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