One of my colleagues constantly receives those no-value, clueless “just checking-in” kind of messages from a random salesperson he doesn’t even know. Naturally, he never answers them. Instead, he sends them over to our sales team and we discuss the approach was not good.
Do you know what conclusions we always come to?
- Nobody is willing to waste their time listening to a person they don’t know.
- No one would be crazy enough to buy a product they don’t even know about.
- Sales reps are finding it make a sale when they use the same tired techniques that bore their customers to death.
Prospecting tips for moving your leads down the funnel:
What these salespeople have failed to understand is the art and science of lead management. However, if you want to succeed at turning your leads into warm prospects, then here are some prospecting tips for you.
Establish a connection
What happens when you meet a person for the first time? A barrage of questions goes through your mind – about their looks, body posture and generally the image they project. You want to determine whether you can trust them. Failure to establish a good rapport means you are not going to listen or open up to them.
The same thing is true for cold market prospecting.
What happens when you pick that phone or fire that email off to your new list? Your recipients will be judging you on a subconscious level. They want to know:
- Can you be trusted to deliver?
- Are you an authority in your niche?
The magic formula to your success = trust + authority!
However, you can’t impress a lead you don’t understand. That’s why it pays handsomely to use a powerful lead management system. It will help you track, qualify leads and send them to the team(s) best prepared to handle them at every stage of the sales pipeline.
After fully qualifying the lead, guidelines dictate that you need to educate the lead about your product. Yes, I still advocate that. However, if you want your cold leads to remain interested, find a clever way to completely change how they perceive your product or services.
For example, we all know that junk food is not exactly healthy. But, to sell it to your prospects you need to reassure them that eating junk food can actually have a good effect on their health. If not eaten on a regular basis, junk food can actually give them quick bursts of energy. This will help you perform day to day activities more effectively. But you need to prove this to them without a doubt for them to buy it.
You’ll have successfully created a paradigm shift. That person will trust you more and you’ve likely made a new customer.
Don’t keep talking about your services/products
It can easily bore your prospects. Especially when they don’t even need your products or services. A CEO friend of mine once spoke about how she had received a call from a salesperson for an SEO company in Atlanta. As soon as she picked the call, the man went on a rant about his services and how he could get them high-quality backlinks.
My friend patiently asked him if he had visited their site, to which he said yes. Unfortunately, the company did not sell their products online. The communication ended even before it began. The reason? It wasn’t relevant to them.
Study the leads. You can do a quick Google search for the person or their company. Invest in a good lead tracking software. For example, you can use your CRM software to search for any recent action they might have performed previously. Make sure you know exactly what the customer needs.
It doesn’t matter how great a product you have built, Customers don’t have time to listen to your ‘what we can do for you narrative’. That’s not going to draw people to you. If you want to grasp your prospects attention, let them know the benefits they get by offering their time to you. Focus on providing value. Be a resource person: that go-to advisor your customers will rush to if they run into a challenge.
Reach out to prospects through social media
When done correctly, social media platforms can used a cost-effective way to grow your brand, generate more leads for your business and connect with your current customers. While most decision makers hate responding to cold emails, majority of them don’t shy away from having a conversation on social media.
Besides, advanced targeting allows businesses to focus on highly qualified leads, making social media platforms quite popular for lead generationhttps://www.leadsquared.com/lead-generation-concept/. Using social CRMs will help you discover prospects and leads faster, participate in conversations with the leads and stay tuned to what people are saying about you.
Here is a little homework for you:
Identify LinkedIn groups where most prospects are spending their time. Understand what interest they have in the group, comment on the posts and possibly spark debates and let people discuss. You can also connect with people on Twitter and engage in discussions based on shared blog posts, interests as well as tweets.
Once you have created enough rapport, you can personalize your email based on what you’ve learned and focusing on their specific pain points. That way you will get them to respond to your emails. For instance, if your prospect is struggling with a problem in their CRM software, you can craft an email around that problem. (see the email below)
Turning cold leads into warm prospects is a journey fraught with a lot of uncertainties. You don’t want to start conversations that never get you anywhere. You don’t want to send emails that end up in the bin. To succeed at getting into people’s nerves, you need to find a way of creating a good a rapport with the prospects by delivering value in your conversation, being relevant and where possible, implementing a paradigm shift in a way that motivates people to respond.
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