Do you really want to get that meeting?

For most companies the biggest bottleneck in the sales process these days is getting into that executive meeting. But how often do we really earn the right to get that meeting?

As a sales person in a “Sales 2.0 world” there are many, many tools and techniques available to us to increase our chances of getting a meeting. From my observation most sales people and sales organizations do not use 10% of these. And some sales people just cold-call with no research and no customization of their pitch – dumb (and largely unforgivable if you know what resources are out there).

Here are some tools available to us that can be used to increase the likelihood of getting a meeting:

• Hoovers, OneSource etc: get the basic information on the company: company description, senior executives, revenue, profit and annual report. You know the drill (I hope!)
• Jigsaw, Spoke: dive a little deeper on contacts. Find middle managers responsible for the area(s) you sell to
• LinkedIn: invest some time building your network in LinkedIn and you can get referrals to executives in the area you want or close enough to help you with coaching on the account. Even if you aren’t closely linked to your prospects you can find some great bio information here
• InsideView, Google News: use something — whether it’s a sophisticated Sales 2.0 tool like InsideView or a free service liked Google News to watch for “trigger events”. Don’t you want to be there when a new CMO starts at your target account? How about when your prospect launches a new product?

These are just some of the tools out there that you can use now. Use the information from these tools to customize your pitch to executives. Show them you have done your homework.

Earn the right to get in!

A couple of great posts by the usual suspects (for great posts on sales subjects), Jill Konrath and Jim Logan, reminded me that sales people should not think like sales people.

We’ve all heard the terms “consultative selling” and “solution selling” but we often forget to practice what we believe.  Both these philosophies implore us to offer solutions to our clients and prospects not push product.  But sometimes we just get carried away and start harping on about how great we and our products are.

Start thinking like a consultant or a business person trying to help a peer and now you have the right mindset for solution (or consultative) selling.  Consultants and business people prepare for meetings, they research markets, they develop ideas and they write thought leadership pieces.

In all the markets I experience there are always more suppliers than there are clients.  Sales people need to stand out from the crowd.  One way still open to us is to think like consultants or business people and add our own personal value to our prospects.

Jim Logan says:

Corporate executives, business owners, investors, and senior management rarely have time for sales people; they always have time for businesspeople. The reason is businesspeople address issues of their primary concern – enabling business. Salespeople generally talk about their products and services.

Jill Konrath says:

Stop putting on your sales hat! Stop thinking of yourself as a seller. You are a business improvement specialist. As a result of your work to improve your customer’s operation, they will buy your product or service. Sales is the outcome of what you do, but it is not your purpose.

Sales is a profession rife with cliches.

One of the most popular is “sales is a numbers game” The dangerous part about this expression is how it gets used: “we don’t need to be smart [about our prospecting]…it’s just a numbers game”

This is where I disagree.  Sure prospecting is a numbers game but the “numbers” in question, how many meetings you get or how many sales you make, are strongly determined not only by the number of calls you make but also by the quality of what you have to say.

Executives all over the world are bombarded by sales people with badly crafted pitches. They absolutely don’t have time to respond to these badly thought out propositions.  If you want to get a meeting, or sell a product directly, you need to spend the time to come up with a truly strong value proposition.

You need to do your homework on the prospect’s company and the prospect themselves so you can hit one of their hot buttons with your voice mail (let’s be realistic here, we get voice mail 70% of the time or more)  For more on crafting quality voice mails see this previous post based on a great piece by Jill Konrath.

So I agree that “sales is a numbers game” but it’s up to you to decide if you want your numbers (a.k.a. chances of success) to be 1 in 10 or 1 in 1,000.

The companies I talk to are always looking for sales “hunters”.  It’s almost a sure thing that if a sales candidate says they are a “farmer” then they are out.  But why are farmers so uncool?

Hosting Brain Carroll’s webinar reminded me of the importance of lead nurturing.  It’s clear from Brian’s research that companies that stay-in-touch with target buyers greatly increase their revenue (one piece of data: leads that are not ready to buy today are 77% of all leads coming in to your company.)  But lead nurturing is another way of saying farming.  So companies that utilize only hunting techniques will do far worse than companies that farm.

If we want our sales outcomes in the future dramatically improve, perhaps we need to think of our human history in agriculture.  Once upon a time there was only hunting – no farming.  Many companies still run their lead generation efforts like early man, foraging in the forest for wild berries and boar.

Here’s a very brief history of agriculture I found on a Rice University website. The beginning seems to have many parallels to how sales and marketing works in many companies:

Before agriculture, people lived by hunting wild animals and gathering edible plants. When the herds were plentiful and the plants flourishing, life was good. But, when the herds migrated elsewhere, people had to follow them and often discover a whole new set of plants to supplement their diet.

This “feast or famine” lifestyle had its definite drawbacks including starvation.

Eventually, people decided that life would be a lot easier if they always had the animals with them and if edible plants or their produce were always available.

So are farmers so uncool?

Last week was a good week.  It was one of those weeks when leads popped up all at once on several prospecting efforts. 

My first feeling was “Why can’t every week be like this?”

But every week in selling is not like this because some components of the sales process are sequential.

When launching a new prospecting campaign there is inevitably a delay until leads start to come in.  It is during this delay that people in the sales team and management start to get uncomfortable.  People often start questioning the whole campaign.  Often I will hear “we must be doing something wrong” or “maybe we need to rework our message” or “this maybe our sales people are not the right people”.

But once the first few big sales are made everyone changes their tune to one of praising the very same sales team they previously doubted.

Sales people and managers need to be patient.  Everyone is under pressure to bring in revenue but panicking during the inevitable sales cycle will not improve results, in fact it will do quite the opposite.  Constant reworking of your message, or changing the target list, or changing the sales team will greatly lengthen the sales cycle — not reduce it.

So for success in prospecting — be patient.