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…]

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…]