Sales 2.0

Getting in the door in an AI world

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The #1 challenge for most salespeople, and small business owners, is getting enough meetings with prospects for their product or service.

Getting through the door to have conversations that may lead to business opportunities seems to be getting harder every day. Today’s big disruptor, AI, may potentially make this situation even worse (hard to believe as the situation seems so tough already!)

For many companies selling a high-end product or service, a meeting is a prerequisite to a sale. A lack of meetings means a lack of sales opportunities, which means a lack of sales and revenue.

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An “uncool” way to get sales meetings

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In this post I am going to talk about an “uncool” way to get sales meetings…ground mail.

Getting meetings with potential prospects is frequently rated as the top challenge for most salespeople and business owners. If you don’t get enough meeting with prospects, then your sales will inevitably be weak–not enough coming in the top of your sales funnel always means not enough coming out the bottom.

When faced with the challenge of getting more sales meetings, some salespeople assume all you can do is send dozens more cold emails or (if they’re the rarer type that likes to call) make several more cold calls.

Although these methods do work, there’s an increasing need to use “multimedia prospecting”, approaching people over multiple channels until you hit upon a method that works for that prospect.

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Multimedia prospecting

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As we’ve introduced more ways to communicate, we (and more importantly our customers) have spread our communication over many channels, leaving less concentration on any one channel.

When we only had a desk telephone, you could reach more people on it, as that was the primary channel for communication. Your prospects picked up the phone when it rang, as it might be their customer or family on the other end.

Then we got cell phones. Now you could give your cell number to just the important people and not let others know your secret cell number. Once you’ve given the important people your cell number, you don’t have to pay as much attention to your desk phone.

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Picking up the damn phone!

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In my last post, I showed you a template for a cold email (below for your reference). I think it’s a pretty good email, but it still has only a small chance of working.

There are just too many things stacked against emails these days. It seems like a major accomplishment just to get an email into someone’s inbox at all—then you have to get them to actually read it and be intrigued enough to act. A lot of “gates” to get through.

So what can you do?…Pick up the damn phone!

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Cold email template (with AI help)

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How do you best approach someone if you don’t have any connections?

It’s far from ideal, and you will have a much better hit rate with a “social calling” approach, but sometimes “it is what it is” and you must go in cold.

Most people I know will opt for an email as the first attempt to reach somebody. I get it. Emails are free and you don’t get the same mental battering as having the phone hung up on you. Given that, let’s look at how you write a half-decent cold email.

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Cold when necessary

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I’m a huge advocate of using human relationships to get into accounts. I really believe it’s a small world. As I’ve shown before you can get referred into 1,000’s of accounts without needing to use a cold approach.

However, sometimes you may be faced with no choice. If you’ve exhausted all your connections, and all the connections of your connections, and nothing is leading you closer to getting into the account, then you may need to resort to a cold approach. But if you do have to go in without a referral, make your chances of success as good as they can be.

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