A million years ago, when I was in sales, cold calls struck terror into my heart. I would have done anything to avoid them, but my employer (Dictaphone) insisted that we do a certain number a week and document them in our weekly sales reports. So, I took a deep breath, dutifully knocked on doors, and probably turned off my share of prospects.
According to champion sales blogger Erica Stritch in “3 ways to get cold prospects to talk to you,” there are several things you can do to fill your sales pipeline. Here they are:
- Be relevant – It’s hard enough to get through to a prospect, so don’t mess it up by babbling on about something that doesn’t matter. Ms. Stritch provides a great example: the salesperson who bent her ear about how great SEO could improve her ecommerce search results. The problem? Ms. Stritch doesn’t sell products online. I’ve had similar phone calls, and I bet you have too.
- Offer value on the spot – Rather than going on and on about your product’s fabulous features, give your prospect an interesting tid-bit, such as a best practice or a how you’ve been able to help another company in the same industry. Eventually, you’ll get to the feature-and-benefit conversation.
- Reach out often – If you knew that it takes an average of seven attempts to get a prospect to agree to meet with you, would you be more willing to reach out more frequently, in a greater variety of ways? Don’t worry about annoying your prospects. Many of them have probably deleted your voicemails and emails and thrown your direct mail pieces out.
Sounds simple, eh? But like so many things in life, simple is not necessarily easy. These techniques require that you budget the time to do them and that you actually carry through.
I’m curious to know about techniques you’ve used to warm up cold prospects.
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