Sales Blog with Sales Tips

There’s a lost art in prospecting that I think many sales professionals could benefit from right now. We’re in a global recession and prospecting is how we will maintain and grow our sales numbers.

Ye Ol’ Gatekeeper
Unfortunately, once we identify a qualified prospect and a decision maker, we have to get past the gatekeepers. Gatekeepers have evolved; they are very sophisticated these days. Below I’m going to provide a three point sales tips process to bulldoze those gatekeepers out of the way.

The irony is that this technique has its roots in old school prospecting sales tips. It used to be called front door cold calling. I’m talking about the kind of cold calling that doesn’t use a phone or email. You’re going to literally walk in the front door and prospect. This is known as premise cold calling these days.

Back To The Future Sales Tips
1. Leave a message letting the prospect know you’re going to physically drop off some relevant information for them. Be sure to tell them exactly (i.e., date/time) when you’ll be there to leave this material and that you’d like to give it to them personally.

2. Show up at their facility at the precise time you specified in your message. This gives you an answer if the receptionist asks, “Is he/she expecting you?” You can simply say that you had told the decision maker you had scheduled this time to drop off some materials. Then the receptionist can provide a legitimate reason why you want to meet the decision maker. You have also been building mind-share with the prospect during this process. Being there and showing up on time is already making you stand out from the crowd.

3. If you aren’t able to meet with the decision maker while you’re at their premise, leave the material and continue to try to contact them later. There is a heightened probability that the decision maker will now take your call. Your site visit represents an effort and interest beyond just leaving a voice mail message or email.  Ensure that you have some hook as to why they should be interested in you and your company when you eventually get in contact with them. A hook could be a value added service that you believe might benefit them, one their current provider doesn’t offer.

Sales Blog Wrap-Up
These aren’t rocket science sales tips. It’s nothing more than an old-fashioned cold calling technique that’s been dressed up a bit in this sales blog. Try it and let me know your results.  Are you bulldozing past receptionists and assistants?  Remember, now more than ever, we need to demonstrate finesse, thinking and creativity.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

Over my last three sales tips posts I’ve talked about prospecting styles and prospecting personalities that don’t work in 2009. Let’s talk about one that does.

The Fourth Type.
In this final sales blog post of the series, I’m going to list the attributes of the 21st-Century-Prospector. This is the type of sales professional who gets results when prospecting, and does so in an efficient and consistent manner.

Sales Tips From The 21st-Century-Prospector.

1. Quality, not quantity. The two overriding objectives of prospecting are to gather information about your prospect and develop a relationship. You can’t have 100 close friends, nor can you realistically work 100 prospects for the same reasons.
2. The sales professional with the most information wins. The more you know about your prospect, the more likely you are to turn them into a customer.
3. Social networking. No, I’m not talking about those Chamber of Commerce meetings that are a waste of everyone’s time. Think about who goes to those, other sales professionals who are looking for leads. You might pick up some sales tips, but that’s not what you’re looking for. The 21st-Century-Prospector uses the plethora of social networking tools available on the Internet. LinkedIn and Jigsaw come to mind as two examples.
4. Be yourself. Don’t use scripts. Let the prospect see your personality. Use good open-ended questioning skills. Don’t forget to listen.
5. Goals, objectives, tactics. We know that mindless activity in prospecting has a poor ROI. We have to know our goal in prospecting (a commission target is a good starting point), the objectives that will support it and our prospecting tactics. In short, we need a detailed and well thought out plan.
6. Education. The prospecting rainmakers of 2009 find training resources beyond what their company provides. I’m talking about mentors both inside and outside your employer as an example; they can provide sales tips that are concrete and immediately applicable to your industry. One cautionary note however: select mentors that you can relate to. Saddling up to a sales professional with 20 years of experience and a $50,000,000 annual budget when you’re a new sales professional selling bricks doesn’t make sense. And by the way, give yourself a pat on the back for reading this sales blog. Your education comes from all kinds of sources.
7. Naive. Remember how naive you were when you first started in sales? Everything was possible. You hadn’t learned what you couldn’t do. You landed accounts that no one else could land. Why? You hadn’t been chained down by fear, cynicism and doubt. You were naive. Being naive is a good mindset when prospecting. It’s especially helpful when prospecting in our current economic situation.

Prospecting Sales Tips Summary.
I can sum up this four part sales blog series in just four sentences.

Know that the efficacy of banging on the phone with prospects culled from the Yellow Pages is not a good use of a sales professional’s time. Know that prospect lists from those lead list companies that provide moldy and dusty information are a joke (worse yet, you have to pay for those “leads”). Finally, know that prospecting is not a work of brute force. The 21st-Century-Prospector makes prospecting a work of finesse, thinking and creativity.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer

In my last sales blog post I provided some sales tips for the Going-Through-The-Motions prospector. This style of prospecting focuses on the activities of prospecting and not the results. In today’s sales blog post, I’m going to talk about a third style of prospecting that is equally ineffective.

“There was also a time when doctors used leeches to cure the sick.”

Back To The Future.
The third type of prospecting style that seems to pervade many sales departments is what I call the “We’ve-Always-Done-It-That-Way” approach. This technique borrows from old-school sales training. You won’t have to look far to find a sales training article or sales blog that is full of these antiquated sales tips.

Here are some examples:

• Closing techniques from the 1950’s. “Think how good you’ll look to your boss after you’ve installed this product. Let’s get this order signed right now.”
• Sales is nothing but a numbers game perspective.
• The use of scripts in order to assure that precisely the right words are used with the prospect.
• The salesperson does all the talking with few questions directed at the prospect.
• The salesperson has one sales skill – talking about features and benefits.

The New Realities.
The truth is that sales concepts have changed dramatically over the last 15 years. We have seen most of those changes in the last ten years with the Internet being the greatest catalyst. What has changed and how do we adapt?

• Buyers have heard more cheesy closing techniques than you know. They’re immune to them and turned off by this kind of manipulation. We have to be straightforward and transparent with prospects.
• Sales is not just a numbers game anymore. We have to segment our market and know exactly the kind of prospect we want to pursue. More time spent on fewer qualified prospects yields much better results than the old “dialing and smiling ’til it hurts” model.
• Increasingly, companies want to partner with fewer suppliers. Partnerships require a relationship. Prospects want to get to know you as much as they want to know your company. This isn’t accomplished with sales scripts.
• Prospects want us to know something about their business before we contact them. Additionally, we should be prepared to ask them focused open-ended questions to learn more about them.
• Features and benefits are something we need to know about our products. We call this value added selling today. However, we need to be able to take this concept beyond just our products and services and apply it to ourselves and the company we represent.

Sales Blog Epilogue.
We’ve-Always-Done-It-That-Way prospecting was fine in its day. It’s all the sales community knew at the time. There was also a time when doctors used leeches to cure the sick. They didn’t know any better either, but most have stopped…I hope.

Stay tuned for my fourth and final sales blog post in this series where I’ll cover one more type of sales prospecting style.

©2010 Scott R. Sheaffer