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.
Social calling helps
The good news is if you take a social selling approach to prospecting, you will have less work to do than if you take an old school cold calling approach.
If you go the cold calling route you are going to need a lot of contacts to burn through, as you will have such small success rates. If you’re success rate in setting an appointment is going to be 1 in 330 (typical per the research) then you are going to need thousands of contacts to get anywhere soon.
Using a social calling approach we may typically get a 25% success rate so we are obviously going to need far fewer contacts.
But you still need to butter your bread
Even if you take a social calling approach you still need good contact data for all your contacts and prospects.
It’s critical to the social selling approach that you do your homework. You need to make sure you look at your target contact’s social media pages and their company’s website, blogs and press releases etc. Your goal as a social seller is to be well-informed about your contacts.
You can only review all this information and be well-informed if you actually have the addresses for all your contact’s social profiles and relevant web pages to hand.
Have someone butter your bread
Data from learned fellows like Sirius Decisions, InsideSales.com and Pace Productivity show that most sales people spend a lot of time not selling. Sadly, a good amount of the time sales people spend not selling is not spent golfing or watching the Premier League (as I would recommend) but rather it is spent on admin.
I imagine you are in sales to sell things. Your top goal is not likely to be “be great at admin tasks like finding the latest contact data for all my prospects and contacts.” Since your goal is to sell not be an admin, you should try to delegate/outsource admin tasks to others.
Don’t be sacred to do this. It’s not snooty or illegal.
The world is flat these days. There are tons of people ready and eager to help with your admin work. This is great work for them. Their goal may well be to be great at admin work. Let them do that and let them help you be great at sales. Check out sites like Fiverr.com and UpWork.com to find yourself an admin or even a team of admins. It’s not expensive and it’s nothing in comparison to the commission you can make by selling another deal.
You can also get this kind of data from websites and sales tools out there on the Internet. You might still need your admins to do a little massaging on the data but you can save a lot of time this way. For example, check out Insideview, or Owler.com.
You want to get out there and start selling so you can keep your sales job, prosper and then make loads of cash. Don’t get stuck doing admin work right out of the gate. Get someone to butter your bread for you.