“This porridge is too hot!” she exclaimed.

So, she tasted the porridge from the second bowl.

“This porridge is too cold,” she said

So, she tasted the last bowl of porridge.

“Ahhh, this porridge is just right,” she said happily and she ate it all up.

And so, it is with prospecting preparation time. [Read more…]

Testing is for marketing not sales.

Does that sentence seem logical to you? It doesn’t to me.

The more time I spend in sales and marketing, the more I see overlap between these areas. Now, sales people are starting to “geek out” and use software tools like marketers have been for the last decade, or so. [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 greatly increasing your prospecting odds without an introduction. I am also going to give you a template you can copy to make this happen.

Typical success rates in getting intros using this approach vary from approximately 1 in 2 to 1 in 5, vs 1 in 100 or 1 in 330 for cold calling. Hence, I think it’s a good approach. [Read more…]

If you’ve read any of my previous posts on this blog you will know that I think relationships determine if you will get a meeting with your prospect.

In this post I’m going to give you a few templates you can copy to help you get referrals to the likely 22,500 people you have available to help you save (and maybe prosper) in your new sales gig.

Typical success rates in getting intros using this approach is approximately 1 in 2, vs 1 in 100 or 1 in 330 for cold calling. Hence, I think it’s a good approach. [Read more…]

Over the years I’ve developed a framework for making prospecting calls more effective. I call this framework “social calling”.

The three elements of the framework are: (1) having clean contact data, (2) leveraging trigger events and (3) using relationships. I’ve covered the first two elements in the two previous posts. Now I’m going to go over the one that makes the biggest difference, relationships. [Read more…]

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…]