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Inside Sales, Cold Calling and Prospecting to Grow Your Business

Posted by Your Sales Leads, Inc in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX on Dec 20, 2007

There are three simple ways a business can develop a pipeline of opportunities, expand their market share and increase their bottom line revenue simply by using inside sales people to build their business.

As a company, we believe that businesses can guarantee their continued success by constantly prospecting for new opportunities. When the economy is good, prospecting ensures your continued success. And when the economy is tight it can ensure your company’s survival.

Simply put, prospecting meaans looking for opportunities. Most people cringe when they hear the word prospecting because they don’t like to cold call. But even though most salespeople would rather take a beating than pick up the phone and make a cold call, it’s proven to work when it’s done right.

Companies have to prospect in order to grow their business.  And companies hire qualified salespeople to close sales.  It’s the step in between that is very often the gap and the one that causes people the most frustration.  The ultimate question is – what is the best use of your salesperson’s time?  Is it in making the 100 calls to get in front of that one prospect?  Or is it actually being in front of as many prospects as possible and having the time to close the deal? Of course, the best use of someone’s time is to let them do what they do best – and that is to close more new business for you! Outside salespeople come at a high price – they bring talent and existing relationships that can be expensive.  And, beyond the initial cost, a business has to dedicate a significant amount of time training them on the technology of the offering.  So, it is a huge investment of both time and money.  And it’s an investment that companies need to hold on to.   In order to retain highly qualified salespeople they have to be allowed to do what makes them feel successful.  They want to develop relationships and close sales – they do not want to cold call and nor should they.   So stop paying them to do something they’re not good at, they don’t want to do, and is a waste of their talents.

Prospecting and cold calling is one of the most successful paths to developing opportunities for your outside salespeople to close. There are numerous methods and techniques to cold calling and I’m going to share three of those steps with you right now. These might sound simple but most people miss at least one if not all of these steps.

The first step is to determine who you are going to call.   Cold calling only works when you know who your customer is. The most effective way to gain a greater market share is to first define exactly who your target prospect is.  When talking about prospecting and cold calling, I always like to use a fishing analogy – you have to stock your pond with fish you want to and can catch. That means developing a database of targeted prospects. Have you ever heard of Willie Sutton?    He was a famous bank robber back in the 1930s. And a reporter once asked him, “Willy, why do you rob banks?” And do you know what he said? He said, “Because that’s where the money is!” So, where is your bank? What’s the one place you should be focusing on?That’s where you need to go fishing. Just like during the gold rush, people went prospecting where gold had already been discovered or where the environment was right for gold to be found. A good way to begin is to look at what has proven gold for your company.  And the best way to do that is to look at the composition of your top 20 customers. Then develop a database, a pond if you will, of targeted prospects that are comparable to your top 20 customers. Though it sounds simple, the process of finding targeted and quality prospects requires expertise and meticulous planning.

The Second step is to determine why you are going to call them.     This is simply defining the reason you’re calling them. That means ‘what is the benefit to the prospect’ of the product or service that you’re offering? When you make a cold call, you have only 10-20 seconds to catch the prospects attention. And the best way to catch their attention is to appeal to their need and highest interest. Very often this statement can also be used as your elevator pitch.  Typically the statement that captures your attention is the one that stimulates your imagination. In a cold call we have to excite the imagination of the prospect – we have to help them begin to envision the goals they can accomplish when using our products or services.

And the third and final step is to know what you are going to say.   Actors practice over and over until they perform perfectly. The more opportunities you can create to “tell your story” the better your story will become. This is the meat of your conversation. The first step was dropping your fishing line in the right pond and the second step was using the right bait to attract the right fish.   Now the task at hand is luring the fish to bite. And it’s important to remember that the bait needs to be customized for each target prospect. This means that you must create different stories – the goal is to present the story to each particular prospect that will be of greatest interest to them. Once you’re created their interest and grabbed their attention, then they will become engaged in further conversation.    And this is what will create the opportunity to do business and generate revenue for your company. We are national inside sales experts.

These three steps that I’ve just outlined are what we do all day… every day. We become an extension of your company and partner with you to become your inside sales team. What we do allows our clients and their salespeople to focus on their core business – making the sale.

We regularly ask our clients for feedback to ensure that we’re providing results.   Ultimately, results are the measurement of our success.   And our clients have told us that, on average, they attribute 17% of their closed business and revenue to our services. That means… one out of every six dollars that their company earns is a direct result of our efforts!

Wellesley Hills group conducted a national survey earlier this year - acquiring new customers is the number one goal for the majority of companies across the United States (63%). And what I found the most interesting part of the survey is that 84% of those companies stated that they were going to acquire new customers by increasing their prospecting and lead generation efforts. In other words, 84% of your competitors are going after your potential and existing clients with more energy and resources. 84%.

So, the ultimate question is…  what are you and your company doing to stay ahead of the competition and guarantee your continued future success?