Guest post by Steve Richard of Vorsight
Picture in your mind the classic sales funnel. People pour a lot of stuff (good, bad and ugly) into the top of the funnel and over time (and with structured process) it spits out paying customers and clients. As you progress toward the lower stages and the spout, there are fewer prospects and hence more order and control for the salesperson. ValueSelling does an amazingly good job of giving you a framework for getting through the stages of the funnel.
- Prospecting – How do I treasure hunt and assemble the puzzle of identifying the correct buyer with direct line and email and seeing where he/she fits into the org chart. What are some good unconventional research approaches?
- Pitching – How do I write compelling talking points to pique interest and tease out a dialogue to get my prospects talking?
- Handling Objections – How do I overcome knee-jerk reaction objections over the phone and get my prospects to agree to a first meeting?
- Emailing and Leaving VM – How do I map out a contact plan with unique emails and voicemails to get past all the vendor noise and increase my prospects’ replies?
- Establishing Process – How do I plan my time, activities, data, and practice to be as efficient and effective as possible?
If someone has already filled out a web form and you are contacting them, doesn’t that mean that it’s not a true cold call?
I think of people who have filled out a web form as quasi-cold calls. They may be interested enough to fill out the form, but they still expect for a salesperson to engage them. And the quality and professionalism of this first contact frequently dictates the outcome.
I’ll give an example. Recently we considered changing our VoIP phone provider for about 20 lines. I received a referral from a trusted person to look into a certain hosted provider (I will not share the name publicly to protect the innocent). I hit their website and filled out a web form. It took the salesperson 48 hours to return my inquiry. The person left me a vm and did not follow up for another two days. Now I admit that we aren’t a big opportunity, but we’re not insignificantly small either. Once I called back and made contact, the person had a very awkward and difficult time in taking this quasi-cold call and making it feel warm quickly. All this salesperson wanted to talk about were the things stated in the web form without the additional color and insight that only a conversation could provide. There was no compelling story beyond the features and benefits that I’d seen on the website.
Anytime you are in a situation when two parties do not know each other and connect for the first time over the phone, it is still a cold call to one degree or another. Many of the salespeople I work with call it a ‘warm call’ to make it seem less intimidating, and that’s fine. When push comes to shove the salesperson still needs to quickly:
1. Engage the prospect
2. Begin to establish rapport
3. Weave in a compelling value proposition to keep the conversation alive
4. Understand more about the prospect’s situation
5. Eventually close the prospect for another interaction to advance the sales cycle.
All of these are elements of a true cold call as well. That’s why I call them quasi-cold calls. You have some advantages, but don’t let these advantages become a crutch and prevent developing the skill. We can have all the technology in the world, but still 99% of B2B sales boils down to the interaction of people, not machines. Good hunters can always farm, but good farmers can’t always hunt!
Calling a form-filler is NOT a cold call. They completed that form for a reason–your job is to find that reason and (dis)qualify the opportunity based on fit with your firm. Big difference when the prospect reaches out you as compared to you reaching out to the prospect.
Cold calling is not dead, but soon will be. That’s GOOD for salespeople. Higher ROI methods that involve a pre-existing, natural connection (networking, in all of its wonderful forms) will inevitably drown out the noise of uninvited cold calls. Time to get on the new bus.