Sales 2.0

Articles on sales prospecting

Book notes: Success is in your Sphere

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I agree with Zvi Band the author of the book Success is in your Sphere that “relationships are our most important asset”.  From everything I’ve seen, if you want to outperform in sales in the long run, you need to build your own network of people that know, like and trust you. No amount of technology or great messaging will get you even close to the salesperson with a top-notch Rolodex.

Success is in your Sphere shows you how to build a world-class network and maintain it. The book presents a framework for building relationships called “CAPITAL”. Here’s how the framework breaks down.

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Book notes: No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.

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I’ve been reviewing some key books in sales and marketing to refresh my knowledge of some of the fundamentals to building world-class “revenue engines”. I’m sharing my summaries here.

The second book I’m covering is No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls, by Latané Conant.

Latané’s book covers an area of marketing that I have long wondered about: Should you “gate” or should you not “gate” your content?

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Sales prospecting made easier

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I don’t understand why it is acceptable for a process like cold calling (now often started via email) to work one in a hundred times–or in email efforts one in a thousand times.

I used to work for a major semiconductor manufacturer. In the chip business “yield” from a silicon wafer is critical to profitability. Teams of people spend their life pushing to get a few more chips out of each silicon wafer.

I picture how a company in the high tech chip business could survive when only 1 in 100 of their chips was usable (or 1 in 1,000). Meanwhile most high tech companies accept this level of productivity in their sales departments. This content is for those who are not willing to accept those success rates.

This post describes a framework that I have found over the last two decades can really change the math on prospecting.

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Go through the motions

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In sales we need to go through the motions.

Our buyers are “frazzled” as Jill Konrath says.

Even if you use social selling techniques that get you a referral or help you connect to a potential buyer using your mutual background, it is still likely to take some follow up before you confirm a meeting time (or virtual meeting time these days).

Research from XANT looked at the optimal “cadence” for prospecting based on the masses of data available to them through companies’ usage of their software. Their study looked at 479,140 outbound cadences from nearly 9,000 companies.

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