In order to be of service to your prospect, it's important to establish an understanding of how they do business, their current status, where they would like to be and how they plan to get there. This is best accomplished by asking a series of open-ended questions to gain that information. For example, "How do you currently handle...?" or "What are you doing in the area of...?" or "When is that taking place?" or "Where will that occur?" or "Why is that?" or "Who besides yourself will be involved?" Open-ended questions are designed to open a dialogue and share information.
Where Are They Now
There are a variety of ways to define a prospect's current status, e.g. financial status, products in use, tax status, types of customers they serve, etc.
Here are some questions to stimulate your thinking prior to your discussion:
Business
* What department are the end users in?
* What is the prospect's primary business?
* What is the prospect's gross annual sales volume?
* How many employees work for the prospect?
* Have you visited the prospect's web site?
* What types of companies does the prospect market their solutions to?
* What solutions does the prospect offer?
* When does the prospect's fiscal year end?
* When are budgets set?
* Is the prospect qualified for non-profit pricing due to tax-exempt status?
* Have you read the prospect's filings and forms on the SEC web site?
SEC Filings And Forms (EDGAR)
All companies, foreign and domestic, are required to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through EDGAR. Anyone can access and download this information for free. Here you'll find links to a complete list of filings available through EDGAR and instructions for searching the EDGAR database. (http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml)
Key point - Ask yourself how you can be of service and help the prospect do a better job of conducting business.
Projects Or Initiatives
* What are their needs, problems, or challenges requiring a solution?
* What are the prospect's feelings about the solutions currently in use?
* What initiatives, processes or projects are currently implemented?"
* What current solutions or service evaluations are in progress?
* What is the purpose or the reason behind the project or initiative?
* How is the project or initiative going?
* Who is driving the initiative, and where are they located?
* What is the prospect's product evaluation process, and how does it work?
Key point - What areas of the prospect's business are they focusing on improving?
Ownership
* Has the prospect merged or been acquired by another company? Why?
* Have any subsidiaries recently spun off into new companies? Why?
* What are the names the prospect's divisions, subsidiaries, affiliates, joint ventures, member companies?
* Has the prospect divested or spun off an independent company?
* If so, who was it? When did it happen? Why? What was the result?
Key point - As changes take place, the prospect is often looking closely for areas of improvement and this creates sales opportunities for products and services that can enable those areas of improvements.
Locations
* Does the prospect have any additional locations, divisions or subsidiaries that are using or not using any of your company's solutions?
* In what countries does the prospect have locations?
* Is there a possibility of an enterprise-wide deal?
Key point - More locations means more opportunities to sell.
Are cold calling and prospecting giving your telesales or field sales team trouble?
Are you a sales manager that needs to expand your market share by cold calling and selling into a Fortune 1000 company who has sales reps or a sales team cold calling to sell products and services in the high technology field?
If so, are any of these scenarios familiar to you or you might have found that the following situations are common when your reps are making cold calls:
Are your salespeople having a hard time cold calling and reaching decision-makers and setting up well-qualified appointments?
Are you finding that they suffering from cold calling reluctance and fear of rejection decreasing their overall call and sales productivity?
Are they having trouble getting past gatekeepers while cold calling and gathering information and even finding if this is an appropriate prospect to call on in the first place?
Are they finding it impossible to get cold calls returned and getting into an endless loop of voice mail with absolutely no results? Then keep reading . . .
Joint Ventures
* If the prospect is a joint venture, what is their role and ownership percentage?
* What solutions does the joint venture offer?
* Who are the partners in the joint ventures?
* What are the names of the joint ventures?
* Where are the locations of the joint ventures?
Key point - Joint ventures and other alliances may create new sales opportunities.
Industry
* What is the prospect's industry?
* Does the prospect specialize in one industry, or is it a conglomerate? Why?
* If the prospect is a conglomerate, what other industries are involved?
* What trends or changes (such as deregulation) are taking place in their industry?
Changes
* Have there been changes to location, management, employees, or departments? Why?
* What are the specific business issues that require a solution? Why?
* What specific competitive challenges is the prospect facing in their industry?
* What changes are taking place in their industry, the economy or their target market that may have an effect on your pricing?
Key point - Industry trends will impact what you say and how you present solutions.
Where does the prospect want to be?
After finding out and establishing where a prospect is now, the next step is to find out where the prospect wants to be.
* What initiatives, processes or projects are being planned?
* What changes are being planned by the prospect to solve their problems?
* Are there plans to bring in outside consultants?
* Are there plans to centralize or decentralize?
* Are there plans to downsize, restructure, or outsource any of the prospect's overall business, or their individual business units or departments?
* What are the plans to expand or combine departments or business units?
* What are the plans to upgrade their current solutions?
* Are there any plans to resell your solutions?
* Do you know where your prospect is going?
* What is the prospect's future strategic direction?
* Why is the prospect moving in that direction?
* Who is leading the move?
How does the prospect plan to get there?
How a prospect plans to move into their future is not always well-defined and may require some questioning and analysis on your part.
Take a look at the following questions:
* How has a prospect solved past problems?
* How are they solving current problems?
* What is their strategic direction?
* Are they expanding or contracting? Acquiring or divesting assets?
* How does the prospect plan to get to where they want to be?
Ask questions such as these. . .
* What are your plans in the area of...?
* How do you propose to implement....?
* What do you think will happen when...occurs?
* What is your timeframe for the rollout of...?
* What is your future strategic direction in the area of...?
These kinds of thoughtful questions indicate caring and professionalism to your prospect. It shows them you've taken extra steps to understand their business, as well as their challenges and concerns. This understanding will also inform your selling phase and the close will become a natural conclusion.
Key point - If you want a prospect to trust and respect your opinions and suggestions, you must be able to demonstrate that you understand their challenges and are prepared to assist them.
Key point - Above all be Polite Yet Respectfully Persistent
and have fun!
What is the big problem today when cold calling?
The big problem today in cold calling on large corporations and selling technology related products and services is that it is so hard to get a response. The salespeople are so afraid of cold calling rejection and overall the cold call effectiveness is pathetic.
It is a bad situation but it really doesn't have to be like this. People that have taken our live Taking the Fear out of Cold Calling sales training workshops have had breakthroughs in all of the above issues. After taking our Taking the Fear out of Cold Calling Training Workshops the participants report the following results:
They are able to reach top decision-makers that can make buying decisions without manipulative techniques and gaining full trust enabling them to set appointments much easier.
Call reluctance and fear of rejection is dramatically reduced because the process becomes so much easier and so much fun. As a result salespeople make many more calls because they're getting results consistently like they never had before.
Getting past gatekeepers is no longer a problem. In fact, people learn how to make the gatekeeper their ally, the person that can help them best in the selling process.
People have learned very simple and effective techniques for getting calls returned from voice mail quickly with prospects eager to hear what you have to offer on the other end of the line.
If these are the kinds of results that you would like to see in your company or if you identified with some of the problems or issues of cold calling, prospecting, making appointments and getting together with top decision makers and if you're a technology company and you would like to see the kind of results that we talked about please continue reading.
You've probably attended sales training that explains once you've had a meeting with the decision maker or prospect, how to make a presentation, how to ask questions, how to handle objections, how to close, etc., etc. However that
does not do you any good if you can't meet with this person in the first place.
This is shown to be the number one issue in selling and salespeople feel if they could just get in front of more prospects more sales would come automatically. In most sales training very specific detailed techniques are never told. They tell you to call to the top or to get a referral from someone.
The truth is most sales trainers explain that so much business comes from word of mouth and that if you get an appointment then you can apply regular sales techniques. But that does you absolutely no good if you're trying to reach a prospect that you know will never call you.
In developing our training over the years we realized that the biggest need was for how to get in front of decision makers, how to reduce the call reluctance and the fear of rejection, how to get through those gat
