It can happen in an elevator or at a networking event or at the weekend barbecue. Most often these days it happens when you write a prospecting email. You need to say what you do.
Unfortunately what most people say, especially if they work for tech companies, does not mean much to the listener, or it sends the other person into a mild snooze.
Here are some tips to change that.
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You’ve heard this before but how much do you “walk the talk” when it comes to knowing your prospects?
Information is power in sales. The more you know about your prospect and their situation, the more likely you are to make a sale. If you’re in the dark, you’re not likely to bring up the right topics at the right time, and you’re way more likely to get a stack of objections.
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How would you do if you and your clients (and prospects) were on the Newlywed game? [Read more…]
In my last post I was talking about how you can greatly increase your prospecting odds by leveraging people you know for an introduction.
In this post I am going to talk about how to greatly increase your prospecting odds without an introduction. This approach is all about “social proximity” as Jamie Shanks calls it.
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In my last post I went through the math on traditional cold calling.
There’s an alternative way to get meetings with prospective clients, but sales people don’t generally use it. Oddly enough they often do use it when they need a job and in this case they call it “networking”. I had to come up with a cool name for using networking in sales so I call it “social calling”.
Whatever you call it, I think the math on the effectiveness of a networking approach vs. a cold calling approach is pretty interesting…
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When I started selling technology I was told to get to the office at 8AM so I could cold call CIOs and catch them before their assistants came in.
When I did succeed in catching a CIO on the phone (one in say 50 dials) they nearly all dismissed me as a time waster. In fact, looking back on my efforts, I agree with them. I was a time waster.
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