Prep For Your Sales Call: Do 3 Things

You have an inbound lead!  There it is in your CRM tool, with your name on it.

What next?  

Do these three things before calling (yes calling, not emailing) your lead:  

- Who is this person?   

Looking up prospects on LinkedIn should be like brushing your teeth.  Why?

Some LinkedIn profiles tell you exactly what you want to know, like whether they are directly responsible for your kind of product/service, and whether they have decision-making authority.   

You may also discover that you have a lot in common with your prospect.  I don’t expect prospects to buy from me just because we went to the same school, or know the same people.  But those things can help establish trust, and ease the way to a business relationship.

- How well is their company doing?  Knowing the revenues and profits of your prospect will give you some context for your discussion about price and budget.   

- What else is on the company’s plate?   Are they downsizing? Consolidating their data centers? On an acquisition binge?  I had a prospect two years ago who was very interested in my company’s product, and was a great fit; but every three months there was a new acquisition they had to deal with, so they didn’t prioritize our solution.      

This kind of call preparation may be easiest for leads that are larger, public companies.  But even small, private companies and their employees are visible to some degree these days through social media (blog posts, twitter, facebook, industry associations and local chambers of commerce).  

Unless you have to contact, say, 100 prospects per day (ouch!), you can find the time to do this basic research that will greatly improve the quality of your conversations with inbound (and outbound) leads.

Social Selling

I thought about buying LinkedIn stock when it went public, but not just because it’s a great recruiting tool.  

For me, LinkedIn was a great sales tool.  I found that I could use it to locate prospects, and research prospects in preparation for phone conferences.   I preached the use of LinkedIn to every salesperson I encountered.  

A recent Forbes article indicates others agree.  It refers to a report claiming that salespeople who use social media close more deals.

The article refers to the use of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and blogs.  Each has its own dynamics, and possible pitfalls.  Like any tool, to quote EC, “it’s in the way that you use it.”

I will post regularly here about how I’ve used LinkedIn to greatly improve the quality of sales prospecting and sales conversations.  The key is to upgrade from the basic free account to one of the paid premium accounts.  

The paid accounts allow you to cold email (“Inmail”) any Linkedin user who is open to accepting Inmails.  The paid plans also show more profiles in your search results, and provide full profiles of more LinkedIn users.   The account fees are a nominal investment for access to valuable business data.   

For more on the use of Inmails, and finding the very-hard-to-find using LinkedIn, stay tuned....