Prospecting has never been harder – or easier. Yes, it’s hard to get responses, but you have all the tools at your finger tips to increase your odds of grabbing the attention of your top contacts and getting a reply.
Gone is the dialing for dollars mentality. You can do better than that.
You can use these tools to do everything from identifying who your best-odds prospects are to deducing why they’d want to speak with you, writing a powerful email, and ultimately attracting them to you. Here are some of my favorites.
1. Identify the who. Once you know the profile of the types of contacts and companies you want to approach, use Zoominfo.com, NetProspex.com, Insideview.com, Stratascope.com or Hoovers.com to search and get the names of the best contacts to talk to. Often you can find contact names by title and department taking some of the guesswork out of who to approach.
2. Delve in. Go a step further and do some research for the contacts you’ve uncovered on those same sites. What have they written? Where have they been quoted? You can quickly get a feel for what’s top of mind with them and where their passions lie.
 Research their companies to identify business issues that will grab their attention. Are their inventory turn times significantly higher than their competitors? Is their aged accounts receivable out of alignment for their industry?
Use this information to craft your grabber value proposition for phone calls and emails. Use it to write blogs or articles on similar topics. The articles and blog posts will attract their attention and peak their interest in you. Comment about your ideas on social networks making you more visible.
3. Secure contact info. Start with these same sites to find the most current contact information for your target prospects. Jigsaw.com and NetProspex.com are maintained by people like you and me, so they’ve often got very current information including valuable email addresses. While you’re there, add a few contacts of your own and earn points for free contact information downloads.
4. Find elusive email addresses. If you still can’t find an email address here’s a trick to try. From your search engine type "@their website domain” and it’ll pull up anywhere on the web where email addresses for that domain appear. Now you’ll have the email protocol for that company and can more effectively guess your contact’s email address. You can also use LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks to send direct messages within their networks. These systems break past your prospects’ email delete barriers when your direct emails do not.
5. Watch your prospects. No, we aren’t talking stalking. Watch what your top prospects are doing using alert services like Google Alerts for free. Set up a daily alert and see all the tweets and comments they’ve made and where they’re mentioned. You’ll know what to talk about when you call and more importantly, when they need you to call.
6. Make your emails stand out. Use Gobbledygook.grader.com to pick out trite or hype-filled words and phrases you don’t even know you’re using. It’s a great tool to increase the impact of your brochures and online copy, too.
7. Know if they’re listening. One of the biggest challenges with email prospecting is knowing if anyone has read what you sent. Use ReadNotify.com to trace email opens and forwards, numbers of times read, and URL clicks. Use Bit.ly to shorten long links for social network comments and emails. You can track how many times the links are opened, forwarded and by whom.
8. Increase your own productivity. If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user Xobni.com is a plugin that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy. You can even search social networks for information about your contacts.
Getting people to reply is the most difficult aspect of prospecting. These tools give you new levels of information and insight to grab their attention and increase your odds of success.
| Kendra Lee - |
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Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert and author of the award winning book “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment. Ms. Lee is a frequent speaker at national sales meetings and association events. To find out more about the author, read her latest articles, or to subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call 303.773.1285. Read More >> |
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When Sales Training Isn’t Working
How to Avoid Becoming a Digital Prospecting Lemming
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Kendra, tremendously useful information.
I think the overarching theme here is that there is no quick fix or magic wand, even with all of the great tools at our disposal, there still needs to be a commitment to the discipline of persistent prospecting.
The way to get people to reply is to personalize/customize the effort we make to each prospect.
It is about getting the right message to the right person at the right time.
I will be checking our http://www.klagroup.com/ as well.