| The
End of Cold Calling
How to Define What a Good Lead for You Is,
and Where to
Find Them
Copyright 1999-2009 Michael Markette
Man, do we have a lot of
sales resources at our disposal today. It was just ten
years ago when the majority of sales professionals were
no sooner welcomed into a job than they began calling
off of lead cards and rolodexes. Today sales people are
sent off to weeks of training and won't enter a
territory without a laptop and cell phone and the
Internet is indispensable. The interesting thing is that
with all of these new training resources, sales tools,
and career destinations, the most sought after sales
resource remains the same: the sales lead. At the
end of the day, sales professionals want more and better
leads before any other sales resource available to them.
The Best Leads are Warm Leads
Sure, there are a few cherry-picking sweet hearts out there that can't handle all the leads they have, but for most of us, we want leads! And we're not talking about buying another list of companies in our territory that we can glance down and recognize 80 percent of them. There is a need for lists, but they are for generating leads. They are not leads in and of themselves. In fact, if we must call them leads, let's at least define them as "Cold Leads". And anyone who has turned a cold lead into a sale knows that while rewarding, it is also exhausting. There have to be better leads out there.
We don't expect to be showered with "Hot Leads". You know... Blue Birds, call-ins, lay-down sales, slam dunks,
gimmes, gifts, Pennies form Sales Heaven. While this would be nice, it isn't reasonable to expect. And to a large extent, we do not want it to happen as if it did we might be out of a job. In a recent poll, 90 percent of sales professionals said that they are, to some extent, responsible for generating their own sales leads. So if lead generation were no longer a problem for companies, how many sales professionals would be let go? Hot leads are a good thing, but let's take them as they come.
So with the fact that we must generate our own leads and the desire to never cold call again, what leads do we focus on? Focus on "Warm Leads". We define warm leads as those accounts that have recently undergone a "change event" that makes them more likely to buy our product or service than before. This includes new companies opening for business as a "change event" in itself. Another example is a change in decision makers within a company, or the opening of a new store location, and so on. Depending on your industry and product being sold, the change event that impacts your chance for a sale will vary greatly.
How to Define Your Warm Leads
Think back to the last dozen accounts that you have sold, or if you're new to your company, ask a seasoned rep about the most recent accounts that they have sold. Review each account and ask yourself the following questions:
1. Why did they buy?
2. Who made the buying decisions?
3. What industries were they in?
4. What other defining characteristics did these accounts have?
Once you have finished reviewing all 12 accounts, start to group your answers into categories that we'll call market segments. If you sell architectural lighting products to retailers your segments might look like this:
- New Store or Location Openings represented the number one reason why they bought lighting
- VP's of Marketing were the typical decision maker
- The retailers that bought cool architectural lighting tended to be more high fashion oriented, selling higher priced items
- Other characteristics included that several stores were growing rapidly due to newly acquired financing
At this point we know who is the most likely to buy your products or services before we even pick up the phone. It is a probability game. Before we cold call straight down a list, we are going to call on those who fall within our target market segments. Specifically, we going to call on those accounts who recently experienced a "change event" in one of our target market segments.
Where to Find Them
So where is the best place to find your warm leads? Less than 1 percent of change events ever make the newspapers, and no one covers American business news like people who sell for a living because it creates so much opportunity for them. The only way to thoroughly cover your territory's change events is through networking with other sales professionals and business owners. The bad news is that as powerful as networking is, it is very cumbersome. Online networking is clearly the most effective way to keep up on the events that trigger your sales opportunities. If you're not networking online, start. Here are some tricks for more effective networking online or offline:
- Prepare a "Hit List" of companies that you are targeting. No more than 20. Print it out and deliver it to those whom you network with form time to time. Ask them to review it and report and "change events" to you ASAP
- Leverage your business cards. Everyone writes on the back of business cards. Print what you are looking for on the back of your cards, e.g. New Businesses, New Accounting Professionals, Growing Companies, etc.
- Start or join a leads group. Keep the group simple and base it on members supplying the group with change events happening in your mutual territories.
The bottom line here is
that you first need to define what a good lead is, then
you need to lead swap like mad.
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