Are you desperately seeking prospects?
Is your salesforce desperately cold calling but with little or no results?
Have your in-bound sales leads dried up?
You are not alone. This is the experience of many organisations in this down market. The years of high impact lead generation campaigns, torrents of inbound sales leads and ever increasing business from established clients are over.
Research shows that cold calling is one of the least liked, least understood and least effective components of selling. Without the specific skills to prospect and cold call effectively, a purely numbers approach will simply duplicate failure rates and sap morale without positively impacting sales pipeline.
There is a way to get your calls returned and win that critical first meeting.
Ask yourself the following questions about your cold calling abilities:
Do your sellers rely on describing your company and its products to evoke customer interest?
How are your prospecting messages any different from those of the competition?
Is your prospecting strategy aligned to the needs of buyers in the current economy?
The key to generating interest is focusing not on what you have to offer, but on what customers value. Cold calling messaging that sounds or reads like a brochure will not win an appointment.
Effective prospecting is not that different to effective selling—it requires the use of research-based, customer-centric, consultative skills. Equally important, this approach reinvigorates sellers, taking much of the monotony and frustration out of traditional cold calling.
To prospect effectively and generate results in this difficult selling environment, hands-on skills are required in 3 critical areas
- Who to call - how to narrow down the list of potential prospects and target those that are the most likely to respond
- What to say - how to deliver persuasive (vs. informative) messages that provoke interest and get appointments
- How to gain access - how to leverage voice mail and gatekeepers to increase contact with decision-makers
To stop unproductive cold calling that does not generate sales leads, attend a Prospecting Sales Training Course or find out more in our Whitepaper, Prospecting for the Major Sale.
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