Want to become resilient in sales?
Want to become unsackable?
Want to become more useful to the organization than your sales manager or even their manager too?
Then learn how to prospect.
The ability to prosper for new business is the differentiator between good and great sales professionals. You will never be out of a job if you can drive revenue without the help of marketing, a network or advertising.
Once you’ve done your initial research on a prospect, the first thing to do is to speak with them right?
Well, what if you could do 15 minutes work each night and then have potential high-value customers calling you, rather than you calling them?
Keep reading to find out how this and much more is possible with some subtle prospecting techniques.
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Expert: Tibor Shanto, he is the Chief Sales Officer over at Renbor Sales Solutions, and he’s an expert in leaving sales voicemail.
Full episode: How To Get 50% Of Your Prospecting VOICEMAILS Returned! With Tibor Shanto
Website: Tiborshanto.com
Call when the pros are in and the slackers haven’t arrived
I tend to go after more senior people and they tend to get to the office a little earlier. I know when I was on the other side of the table in corporate America I was at the office by 7am thinking I’ve got a window of quietness to get stuff done.
So if I can call at that time of the day and the person answers, they know it’s not going to be one of their team ’cause they get to the office at 9:00 and so I can have a distraction-free conversation.
Leave strategic voicemails
Say I know I’m going to be in the office this morning. What I might do is, late at night, at about 7pm, I’ll leave 15 voicemails for different people. I do it when I know they won’t answer.
My voicemails are roughly about 15 seconds long. So leaving 15 voicemails, you could do it at any commercial break in your favorite hockey game.
The idea is that, because you’re leaving messages late in the day, they’ve probably cleared their voicemails when they left to travel home for the evening. So when they return in the morning you’re going to be one of the first messages they open.
If those messages tickle something in the back of their mind, they’ll call you back as they have got that hour of breathing room first thing.
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Expert: Heather R. Morgan is a former economist, writer, complete legend, and now one of the world’s leading cold email experts.
Full episode: How To Get A 35% Response Rate To COLD EMAILS! With Heather Morgan
Website: SalesFolk.com
Test your cold email outreach
Once you have what I consider the basics, like title, company size, industry, you can build a list of around 200 leads.
One of the cool things about cold email is it’s so honest. Because you haven’t been introduced, these aren’t referrals, these aren’t customers -people are completely honest.
They either like you, or they don’t. They either respond, positively or negatively, or they don’t.
With that in mind, you can look at the results and pull data from them. You don’t just wanna look at, “Hey, which email templates performed best, which had the best response rate”.
You also wanna look at who responded, and who responded to what. And sometimes you will see a cluster around a certain message, and so maybe email 3A is this winning email, this sequence that got the most response rate by far. But email 5B got all the people from Idaho to respond for example.
So you want to look back and forth and reverse engineer the email that the correct people that usually buy your product responded too.
And especially as salespeople, after you get their response, you’re talking to them on the phone. You get to follow them throughout their sales journey, and you get to understand why they responded, who they are, and so you have a luxury that marketing rarely has.
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Expert: Kayvon has earned a reputation online and with his clients as the one-call closer. He helps his clients close high value, high ticket sales in just one phone call.
Full episode: How To Win A Business Deal In ONE PHONE CALL! With Kayvon
Website: Kayvon.com
Don’t chase, let the customer sell themselves
When I’m on the phone with someone I can really help, I act disinterested. I use a very low tone. I act like they’re already wanting to buy from me, rather than overtly trying to sell them.
I ask “Why me?” “Why do you think I’m the one that’s gonna help you?”
The process is, first, qualify them. For example, I’m selling a $20,000 4-day event. The first question I ask is, “Are you able to travel?”. Because a lot of prospects lie on the application.
“Are you willing and are you able to travel? Okay, good. And are you willing to travel on these dates? So, before we move forward, there’s nothing I need to know that you’re not gonna be able to make a commitment today?
“So why did you take the time out of your day? What’s going on in your life that is so important that you wanna speak to me now?” Because we know that there are tonnes of people out there selling whatever I’m selling, so I need to uncover, why me?
At this point, they are selling themselves on you, on why your product works. You don’t have to sell the features or the benefits, they’re selling it to themselves.
Constantly measure the prospects “buying temperature”
I ask two to three questions, and I know right away where they are on a scale of one to 10.
One meaning they’re not gonna buy or they are fence-sitting, or 10, they’re gonna buy, it’s a high probability.
If they’re anywhere between a one to a five, I use reverse psychology.
I say things like, “Well, it seems like you’re doing good already, are you’re doing well? What’s the matter with that? I’m sure things are gonna get better. I’m sure word of mouth works for you. Why is this so urgent? Things are going smooth, wow. You made $3,000 last month, that’s pretty good, no?”
Then you’ve got them opening up, because if a customer is closed, if they’re restricted and if you can’t open the customer up, you’ll never be able to make a sale.
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Being able to research new potential customers online, pick up the phone and connect with them and follow up over email, social media and at industry events has never been easier.
This is the golden age of selling. Are you taking advantage of it?
NOTE: All the quotes come from The Salesman Podcast (the worlds biggest B2B sales show) but have been edited for readability on screen.
