Posts with Category "Sales Prospecting"

Generate More Leads with Existing Accounts Through Value and Collaboration

Most people think of prospecting as reaching out to people they don’t know, with an over-the-top approach, to interest them in buying something they’re not thinking about. This isn’t the only way to generate more leads.

Prospecting isn’t just a cold activity, and you don’t need a sledgehammer approach to make it work.

Key accounts are typically huge, untapped opportunities for more business, but the outreach tends to look very different.

To generate more leads with key accounts, sellers often use the same tactics they do when cold prospecting. It’s not called “key account sales” just to use fancy words. It’s different.

If you’re selling to a key account, you know them already. And they know you. You’re important to each other. You’ve built trust. That’s a very strong platform. One you should be careful to protect.

At the same time, most realize they can and should be doing more work with their key accounts. Since no one else is going to make sure the client receives maximum business value from their relationship with your company, you must be proactive to make it happen.

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Sales Call Planning: What to Know Before Every Sales Call

By Mike Schultz & John Doerr

Eighty percent of success is showing up. - Woody Allen

Woody Allen’s advice is pretty sound for salespeople as well, assuming you show up prepared.

We acknowledge that sometimes you do just show up (or—hallelujah—a prospect calls you out of the blue) and you haven't done any preparation for the sales call. It's reasonable to suggest that, on occasion, sales calls are appropriately deemed 'exploratory discussions'; the kind of discussion in which we just talk and 'see where it goes.'

Take this approach in most business development situations, however, and you'll lose more than your share of sales that you should have won. Interestingly, whether you have a two-thousand- or two-million-dollar price point, to increase your odds of winning new clients, you still need to do the same basic planning and know the same essential information before your sales calls.

Here are six sales call planning questions you can answer for yourself before every sales call that will help prepare you for business development success...

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5 Sales Prospecting Techniques You’ve Probably Never Tried (But Should)

By Ago Cluytens

What is the #1 challenge or issue you face when it comes to growing sales for your business?

When I recently reached out to my network and asked that same question, 75% mentioned sales prospecting as their #1 challenge.

The problem isn’t that people don’t know what do to; it’s that what they’ve always done no longer works. Want proof? Think about the last time you met an actual decision maker at a networking event, and that conversation led to a sale. How about from a cold call? Trade show? Advertisement?

The simple truth is this: if you do what everybody else is doing, you’ll get the same results everybody else is getting.

Which, in a world where prospects are increasingly turning off their phone and turning on their spam filters, isn’t much.

So, if you want to stand out (and get more meetings), here are five sales prospecting techniques you’ve probably never tried (but should).

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The New Rules of Selling, Part 1: Play to Win-Win

By John Doerr

Are you playing to win-win?

Rule #1: Play to Win-Win. (This post is the first in a series of blog posts on the new rules of selling.)

Win-win is a common negotiating philosophy. The idea is to find solutions that satisfy the interests of both parties, and maximize value on both sides. Since repeat business and referrals are so important in complex sales, employing win-win as part of your selling technique and philosophy should be a foregone conclusion.

However, in the name of "win-win" many salespeople get so tied up in the name of “providing value” during the sales process that they:

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Prospecting with Old “Friends”: Making Outdated Leads Work

By Bob Croston

Are you taking the opportunity to reconnect?

If your firm is like most, you’ve been using CRM software for years now. Name after name, title after title, data point upon data point, you’ve likely stockpiled a huge amount of prospecting information through various lead generation activities. You’ve created countless records and guided each one through your sales pipeline.

What do you do with those records once you can no longer push them forward? Again, if your firm is like most, you probably leave them languishing in your database, perhaps with a sad “lost – chose competitor” or “dead – no budget” tag attached. But these are more than just dead data...

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