I recently attended a great webinar entitled, Social Selling and Cold Calling: 21 Tips You Don’t Know, presented by Jamie Shanks, Ralph Barsi, and Steve Richard. In the webinar, these proven sales leaders shared their personal insights, offering easy to implement tips that can help boost a salesperson’s selling power.
This post will share 6 of my favourite tips from the webinar to help you connect with more prospects and earn more sales.
1. 3X3 Research
Before reaching out to your prospect, use three minutes to find three pieces of information on your target organization or prospect. The goal of these tidbits of information is to snap your prospect from system one (auto-pilot) into system two (actively thinking and listening).
2. Jobchangealerts.com
This handy little tool will send you daily e-mail alerts when your LinkedIn connections change jobs. These updates are a big opportunity to follow up with your connections when they join new organizations in order to gain access to their new organization. Given that your connection is already trusting of you and your solution, this can lead to much shorter sales cycles.
3. Limiting Google Searches by Time
I consider myself pretty good at putting Google to work, but I was surprised to learn that Google search results can be limited chronologically. When entering a search on the results page, simply click “Search Tools” followed by the drop down menu “Any Time”. You will then be able to select a time period range, helping you to find the most recent updates related to your search.
4. Speak with a Client Voice
For those just starting out in sales, phrasing things from the point of view of your prospect’s peers is an easy way to create curiosity. Your prospects are more likely to be interested in what their peers are doing than what you tell them. Use your selling skills to tell a story from the perspective of your prospect’s peer in order to make a deeper connection and increase the likelihood of earning more business. For some additional tips on how to speak to your prospect, be sure to read our blog post, 5 steps to selling the solution, not the product.
5. Use Three Sentences
If you want your prospect’s attention in your e-mail you should keep the message limited to three to five sentences. A brief e-mail can be read and understood without a major investment of time, and can easily be viewed on a mobile device. Your brief message is more likely to be read and more likely to receive a response.
6. Send a Pre-Emptive Email
In many LinkedIn groups the question of “should I call or email a prospect?” often comes up and receives a variety of mixed responses.
Pre-emptive emails can work well prior to a call. The pre-emptive email lets your prospects know that you would like to talk to them, when you would like to call them, and why you are calling them. Doing so allows you to warm up the call, make for a more productive conversation, and gives the prospect the right to refuse or accept your call.
Put these tips to work for you to boost your social selling power and earn more closed business. If you enjoyed this post, check out our free white papers to get more tips from the Venture Accelerator Partners team.
