“Informed-calling” is the prospecting method where in place of making cold-calls, you instead call potential customers with a specific reason based off of something you’re learned about them.
An example of how it works is you might be selling B2B in the software industry.
Prospects you’re trying to reach are end users of software and typically work for either an IT company or in the IT department of a company.
Before you make the call, you quickly research the web and find out something of interest. Example might be you discover that a company known for outsourcing its IT work has announced they’re no longer going to outsource work.
This piece of information could be of interest to a number of people to whom you’re trying to sell. By being able to call and share what you know and asking them what they know could very well lead to a great conversation.
End result is the person you’re trying to reach will see you in a different light than other salespeople and now be more receptive to hearing what you have to say.
This process does take a few more minutes to do than the old cold-calling method, but I’ll say without a doubt the results you get will be far superior.
When you are doing research what you will find is one piece of information can be used with multiple sales prospects.
When you are able to do this, suddenly the speed with which you can make prospecting calls increases and can quickly approach the same number that could be made by purely cold-calling.
Copyright 2013, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog.
One Response
Great post! In the B2B market especially, the amount and type of information available to sales people has really changed the way they do business – especially for prospecting. We’ve all seen the growth of sales and marketing automation. But ultimately, it comes down to having better sales intelligence up front — pain points the company is trying to address, the other products they’re using and even the basic data like direct-dial contact information for key decision-makers makes a huge difference in prospecting success. We love to see experts commenting on this trend and the value of sales intelligence!