Phone prospecting : It is all about the method !!!

"Lift up the receiver, I'll make you a believer"

- Personal Jesus - Depeche Mode

Your company plan to do do phone prospecting. You are in charge and scared to death. Don't panic, do it me-tho-di-cal-ly !!

1. Define your objectives

Before starting, you have to clarify what you want to achieve. This will help you to better target your speech, and to track progress. Indeed, you will approach people differently whether you want to

• Identify them: find a name or contact behind a company name
• Qualify them: among all the prospects you found, you want to know which one need your solution, when they need it, ...
• Get beta testers
• Get sales meetings
• ...

Some of this objectives may combine together, as obviously if you do not want to spend the next three months in useless meetings, you have to identity and qualify your prospects before making appointments.

2. Prepare a prospect list

See my previous post: 6 tips for making prospects lists

3. Prepare your speech

Your speech is composed of many small step:

• Introduction
  Present yourself and explain why your are calling.

• Getting to know the other person
  It is always better to ask some questions before starting presenting the product. Knowing more about the person you are calling will help you to adapt your speech in order to highlight the most important benefits.

• Product presentation
• Product benefits
  While presenting the product, keep in mind the expressed needs of the other party. How you should present the product could be a blog post by itself, I will try to make one later.

• Crossing encountered barriers
  This is the next point of the post... 

• Conclusion
  The most important part of the call. Do not hang up without spending some time concluding the call! In any case, you have to know which is the next step with this person. In case of positive feedback, it may be a meeting or sending more information by email. In case of a negative one, it may be calling another person, or calling X months later...

To my mind the best way to organise your speech preparation is to build a tree representing the call and which will cover the maximum of situations. Obviously you should not be reading this when calling, but preparing it and re-reading it before calling will help you to grasp the good arguments when you need them.

Note that you can have two or three different speeches depending on the person you are calling (receptionist, technical people, CEO...)

4. Identify barriers

Inevitably, you will come up against barriers.

The first obvious one is the receptionist : who are you ? why are you calling ? This is the moment where you will need a little bit of sales technique. Prepare some pretext to call.

If you feel that you will not be able to cross this barrier, at least ask who is the best person to call, or who is deciding on the topic you are interested in. At least you will have more information for next call.

Try to be friendly, the receptionist can be an unvaluable source of information. If you are kind enough, you may even get the time or day when the person you want to reach is most likely to be here. If you know when to call, your prospection is way more efficient...

Then if you cross the receptionist, maybe you will encounter a price objection, or someone pretending having no current needs, or no decision power.

Do not give up at the first objection, do not try to answer it in one sentence, or to ignore it. Ask questions, try to know more about the root cause of this objection. Even if you do not manage to convince your prospect, you have to find the exact reason why this objection is coming. A call is never failed if you learned something about these barriers, because it will help you to find how to cross them.

5. Adapt  your speech: it is all about the metrics

Which pretext generally makes receptionist becoming friendly ? Which argument goes to the heart and mind of your prospect ?

Write down your observation after each call. 

Track where you are failing. Is it at the receptionist ? When speaking with a technical person ? Track where you are succeeding. Is it when you speak directly to a CEO ?

After a few calls, you will be able to derive average failure/success rates, and to benchmark prospecting methods and arguments against them. It's like A/B testing by phone.

6. Follow up

If you reach a decision making person which seems interested, it generally pays to visit soon after the call. Do not let time fly, by meeting them soon after a good call, you can benefit from the relationship you have started to build. If you wait too much, you loose all the benefits of the call you made and you have to start everything from zero. 

Also, when you call people in the name of your company, you are engaging your company. If you commit to send more information or to call someone back in X months, you have to do it ! You can use any system you want, but you have to choose something to remind you to do it !

See previous post: B2B sales funnel follow up and estimate to find examples on how to organize following up in your company.

7. Just do it !

Although a bit intimidating. phone prospecting can be an incredible source of information in order to build a repeatable sales process and drive your company to success !