If you find yourself thinking you need to do some sales prospecting but you just can’t seem to get going, you are not alone. Part of this might be a little call reluctance, but most can be tied to a few hurdles that make it tough to just get your outbound effort going.
1. You don’t know who to call.
The first hurdle that will slow you down is that you don’t know who to call. You need some meetings, and you know the title of people that you want to meet with, but sometimes, you start with a geographic area and a list of companies and simply don’t know how to go from there to know who exactly to reach out to or start with.
Here are a few things to help:
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the best business-to-business prospecting tools as it is almost like CRM in that prospects update their own contact records. This is a great resource to use to figure out where to start or who to call.
Contact Database Services
There are many contact list services that you can subscribe to or purchase lists from that will give you contacts to start your sales prospecting efforts with.
Your CRM
There are probably contacts that have already engaged with your company in some way or another that should be followed back up with. This should be a great resource to use when finding contacts to call.
Start with the Gatekeeper
Sometimes, you will only have the name of a company and the main phone number. Believe it or not, if you play your cards right, this is all you need.
Simply call the gatekeeper and say something like:
Hi, I am trying to connect with the HR director. Can you help point me in the right direction?
Or:
Hi, I am trying to connect with the person that overseas staffing for new projects. Can you help point me in the right direction?
If you are direct and confident, you will get a name or get passed through. If you don’t, circle back on another day and try a different approach or try the same thing if you get someone else.
2. You don’t know what to say.
Once you know who to call, you might feel a little apprehension about what you are actually going to say when you get someone on the phone. Here are some quick tips to help with this during sales prospecting:
- Have a list of good pre-qualifying questions
- Know the key problems that you can help to fix
- Have responses prepared for all of the common objections that you will face
Those three things will greatly improve your ability to know what to say. You can use SalesScripter to build out your complete script.
3. You can’t seem to get a hold of people.
If do perform a small amount of sales prospecting, you may begin to feel like you can’t seem to get a hold of anybody. This is not just you – it is really tough to connect with prospects.
But this does not mean you should not do any type of outbound prospecting. You just need to do a certain amount of it for it to really make sense. You also need to make multiple passes when reaching out to prospects and use many different communication methods before you can expect to connect.
SalesScripter will help you boost yours by building all of the scripts you need to make sure you know exactly what to say and ask when you reach out to and connect with prospects.