Articles on sales prospecting

In order to contact prospects you need to have their contact information.

Today’s post is not about rocket science. This is the first post in the more practical area of actually doing this prospecting thing.

During the posts about preparation I told you about getting your prospect profile together. If you did that, you should have a good sense of who you want to contact, including the type of company they work for, where they are located and their typical job title.

Now you need to take that prospect profile and grab actual people’s names, company names, addresses, emails and social media profiles that match it. You want to grab these and put them in a spreadsheet or your handy CRM system. [Read more…]

OK I need to come out of the closet.

In the last two posts I did a bunch of math. I wanted to boil down cold calling vs. social selling data so we could do a somewhat fair comparison. Here’s the punchline. [Read more…]

This post is a bit of a continuation from last week’s post. In that post I did some math.

The math was about the conversion rates of cold calling based on data I have collected over the last few years from others and my own sales team.

This post is going to be about math too but this time I want to focus on prospecting using a social selling approach or what I call “social calling”.

[Read more…]

Today’s post is going to include a few numbers.

I’ve actually gone a step further than I’ve gone before in this post and boiled everything down to time, which is the “ultimate currency” for us humans.

I collect data on cold calling whenever I see it, as I am fascinated by trying to figure out if there are better ways to prospect. I’ve got three sets of data for you here. One from a university, one from a smart sales expert and one from my team. [Read more…]

Congrats you have a brand-new “greenfield” sales territory!

Unlimited opportunity, untouched accounts, no other reps vying for your business. Not to mention our products are the most awesome thing ever invented. Boy, you are going to coin it in!

Not!

Let me translate. [Read more…]

I just finished reading The Challenger Sale. (I know, a bit late but finally done.)

I have to go back and find where they decided to name the type of sales person that is most successful these days “challenger”. I suspect there was some good debate on that name. The prospecting approach recommended in the book could probably better be called “insightful” or “insight-based” or something like that. [Read more…]