The key: Research
Sam Dobbins //April 2, 2015//
Happens all the time: The sales manager comes in fuming because leads aren’t filling your company’s pipeline. Your teleprospecting team blames the lack of leads on the quality of your list. Your sales manager and your marketing manager fight it out in management meetings, and the final result is . . . status quo. As a teleprospecting professional, wouldn’t you like to break this frustrating cycle?
You can!
As a lover of the phone, I know that a lot of good money is left on the table because of one essential corner that is constantly cut: research.
I know, I know. Your sales manager doesn’t want to think research is necessary. He or she wants to see you on the phone. We’re taught from day one that if we’re not making X amount of calls a day, we’re falling behind in our work. That pressure is what keeps us in a robo-dialing mode, with less than stellar success. Believe me, even five minutes of research will improve your database of prospective clients much more than five more calls of “No thanks.”
Here are some ways you’re probably naturally doing research without even knowing it:
And here are ways to improve your research and list-building skills:
Now dive in again. Break the list into daily manageable amounts of names. Let’s say that number for you is twenty-five. Go through the top twenty-five names on your list and look up their websites. Once on the site, look for the management team, the board of directors, the mission statement, and for any information where their business messaging crosses over your product or service offering. If they say “we use state-of-the-art technology to service our clients,” and you sell the best software in that area, you have a common area for discussion. If your list says the CFO is John Doe and yet the website says the CFO is Jane Brown, you have a reason to call and clarify your information.
We’re all telephone experts. But with proper research, we’re also list-builders extraordinaire.