It can be easy for us to feel like there is not a lot that we can do to build interest when performing sales prospecting. Either the prospect will need and want our product, or they won’t. And with that being the case, we can fall into believing that all we can really do is talk about our product and what it does, and then the prospect will either have interest or not.

This is not the correct and optimum line of thinking as you have a tremendous amount of control over building interest, and it does not involve just talking about your product. An important thing to grasp is that actually talking too much about your product at early sales cycle stages can actually decrease interest.

Interest is essentially curiosity. And there are a number of things to discuss to trigger curiosity. Here are a few:

  • Focus on the value that you offer
  • Outline how you differ from other options
  • Discuss the impacts if the prospect does not do anything
  • Tell a story about how your products helped someone else
  • Communicate the ROI that you deliver
  • Paint a picture of a future state

When you are sales prospecting, you may be interacting with a prospect on a quick cold call or in an email, and you might not have a lot of time and attention to work with. As a result, you won’t be able to go into great detail in all or any of those. One way to implement this is to create statements that have some quick details for each of those categories.

Consider these statements to be silver bullets. And when you have these bullets, have them loaded up and deliver some of them when interacting with prospects. It is these silver bullets that will help when sales prospecting. You will know this when prospects start showing indicators of interest.

The important thing to always remember is that we don’t need to build enough interest so that the prospect purchases from us. We just need to build enough interest so that the prospect agrees to go on to the next stage in the sales process. If we are on a cold call, we just need to build enough interest so that the prospect agrees to meet with us or have a first conversation.