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The way you prepare for a sales call can have an effect on the call’s outcome. While cold calling might seem like the easier option in a fast-paced environment, taking time to research your prospect and the company can help you go in warm and improve your chances of success from 2% to just over 30%.
However, there’s no need to spend hours writing a detailed essay on your potential customer or creating a foolproof plan to move the conversation forward. A few minutes of strategic research and planning is all it takes to give you the leverage you need.
Creating a pre-sales checklist can enable you to decide which information you need and where to find it, while keeping you on track to achieve sales goals. Here are some tips to help you construct a checklist and prepare for your next sales call in just 15 minutes.
Goals:
Find out the customer’s relationship with your company.
Learn about any prior interactions and where they are in the funnel.
If a prospect shares their phone number with you, there’s a good chance they’re pretty far along in your sales funnel. In fact, the average B2B buyer is already 57% through their purchasing journey when they hop on their first call with a sales rep. Thanks to search engines, forums, review sites, knowledge bases, white papers, social media, and an overwhelming amount of data and information available online, customers and clients are educating themselves as much as they can before turning to a company.
That means marketing needs to be on top of its game, guiding prospects through the upper sections of the funnel. But this also means salespeople are just moments away from critical information about the person on the other end of the call — as long as their CRM platform collects and organises all customer data, including every opportunity and every interaction.
Your CRM software will tell you how many touchpoints a prospect got so far, what those touchpoints were, what prompted the lead to get in touch and which products or services they’ve researched or are interested in. The CRM software pulls up this information quickly and visually.
Goals:
Find out about the company:
Its demographics: size, location and history
Strengths, mission and values
Financial health
Competitors: where does this company fit in their field?
Your CRM platform can tell you nearly everything you need to know about a prospect and its relationship to your company. But if your prospect has yet to share the full story, experienced sales reps need to rely on their own research skills.
Sales, to some extent, is a numbers game: Not only do your chances of closing a deal increase the more you can prequalify a lead, but you’ll make more sales overall by increasing the time you spend speaking with prospects.
That means pre-call research needs to happen fast. Using the following three sources can give you a better understanding of your prospect. Just be sure to limit your total research time to about seven well-spent minutes.
1. Social Media
Begin your research with social media. Find out which networks the majority of your prospects are on and keep those links handy. Become familiar with how to quickly look people and companies up so that finding the right profiles and pages take very little time. Reps who do this often develop a habit of moving their eyeballs to the same places on each profile without having to navigate too much. Here are a few sections that should tell you a lot in just a few seconds:
About Page/Self Summary
These pages give you a quick overview of people and companies.
Interests/Groups
These will tell you where else you can connect with them and get a fuller picture of the person.
Posts
Here, you can often learn about any changes, current struggles, or successes that can help you understand where your prospect is right now.
As you go through the posts, jot down a few notes. Specifically, look for:
Interests or people you have in common. These can make great icebreakers.
Language and tone. You can build trust by mirroring these.
2. Company Website
As you wrap up your social media research, quickly scan for links to a company website. Social media profiles can give you a few quick details about a company, but if you still have unanswered questions, their website can help fill in the blanks. Look for these pages in particular: home, products and services and an about page.
Home
By now, you’ve probably got a basic understanding of what the company does from their summaries on social media. The next step is to check out their homepage and see if you can start filling in the gaps.
Products/Services
If the home page is vague or you’re still not completely sure what the company does, check out what it offers.
About
A quick scan of this page can tell you how this company positions itself in the market, as well as their values and priorities. If you’re lucky, you’ll also be able to read a brief bio on your contact and get an idea of the company’s hierarchy. Knowing who the decision makers are can help you set a goal for your call or know who else to talk to at the company.
Still have some time? Click on “Newsroom,” “Press,” or “Blog” to see what’s new with the company.
3. News
If the company doesn’t have social media profiles or an extensive website, however, there’s still one more source that can help you predict a prospect’s needs: the media.
First, try searching on Google for the company or prospect name, and look at the results in the News tab. Another phrase to try is “[Company Name] press release” to find any news stories the business itself has put out.
To quickly learn all you can, scan headlines and subheads. News stories and press releases are designed to give you the important information up front. Only spend more time reading if the story directly relates to your upcoming conversation.
You’re 10 minutes into your pre-call checklist. You have a good idea of who your prospect is and where they are in the sales funnel. The next step is to create a game plan.
Define your goal
Eighty per cent of sales occur after five or more follow-ups. For each call, it’s important to have a specific goal in mind, such as better understanding a prospect’s needs, building rapport, or addressing a specific obstacle that’s in the way of the deal. Write down your goals and highlight it so it stays top of mind.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Every salesperson knows what’s unique about their brand’s offerings. The best salespeople also understand their own strengths and weaknesses. A Meyers-Briggs personality test is a great way to learn these. About half of all people who take the test are introverts, for example. If that’s you, you know that being the fast-talking, cheerleading type of salesperson isn’t how you’d prefer to interact with leads. Play up your strengths, such as being able to thoughtfully answer questions and dive deep into discussions about your products or services.
Briefly review what strategies work for you and brainstorm some ideas on how to connect with this particular prospect. If your prospect seems like the cautious type, think about how you’ll reassure them with your own confidence or by explaining your company’s satisfaction guarantee. If the prospect’s social media is full of jokes and funny videos, get ready to be more lighthearted.
Build a Relationship
One of the best ways to earn a sale is to personalise your interactions with a prospect. Connect with them at the level that they are in. Be aware of or get ready to learn about their interests, as well as what matters to them and their business.
When you talk to this new lead, address their individual needs and explain why is your company the best for meeting those needs?
Is your prospect dealing with budget cuts? Tell them how buying from you can save them money.
Are they struggling to expand? Talk about how your services can help them boost their market share.
Is the company outpacing the competition? Emphasise how you can scale with them.
Take a look at your notes and use them to create a customer-specific, compelling hook. If they’re still in the exploratory stage, use another method to start building a relationship with them. Whatever you do, you need to be relevant and offer them a specific value. Your overarching goal is to guide them into the next part of the sales funnel.
Now that you’ve taken some time to understand your prospect, their company, and how you can best help them, use your last minute before the call to relax. Racing against the clock to prepare for a call can get anyone’s adrenaline pumping, and you don’t want that energy to speed up your speech or interfere with your ability to listen.
Go over your notes, then take a deep breath. Find that zen that allows expert sales reps to turn any call into a friendly conversation. You’ve done your homework and you’re ready. Now go get ‘em.
Read more about how you can create a seamless customer experience in our free ebook: 4 Steps to Transforming Your Sales Process.
