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 !

6 tips for making a prospects list

They are numerous reasons for which you would like to have a list of people in your current market segment. This may be preparing for phone prospecting, or evaluating the size of this market segment, doing market watch or whatever... As I am preparing a post on this subject, I will mainly focus on phone prospecting.

Although this can take a tremendous amount of time, this is not so difficult. You have plenty of tools to help you doing that:

• I hope you already installed Google Analytics on your website? If not go do it now !!! and do not forget to come back after ;-). If you look at the service provider view, you will be able to determine the company of some of your visitors (in my case and Golaem website, it is roughly 10% of visitors). Obviously you won't have any name, and will have to go through the receptionist (or look at my last tip), but anyway you know that someone in this company is interested by your company. Better than that,  you may even know by which product they are interested if you look at the content/service provider association! This significantly increases your odds of realizing your goal when calling.

• Twitter followers. Not only yours, also look at your competitors' ones! If they are interested in your competitors they are chances that you will be able to interest them! On top of that, twitter may be an alternative way for contacting the good person directly.

• Search directories, association or societies members, conference exhibitors lists... The internet is full of thematic lists that you can take advantage of...

• Subscribe to industries newsletters, and thematic job boards... Each week that's a new bunch of prospects, delivered directly in your mailbox! On top of that, you know what they recently announced or achieved, or that they are recruiting for new projects, and what these new projects will be about. This is of incredible value because it gives you some context to call your prospect. You can start the conversation by "congratulations for V4 release last week" or "I know you are currently setting up a new CRM, and I have some solutions that may be of interest to you..."

• Ask your current customers or prospects. They may know better than you who could be interested by what you have to say and give you a few names. Starting the call by: "I call you because one of our good customers, Mr. X, told me you could be interested by our company..." assures you at least some minutes of attention instead of being hang up on...

• Finally, if needed, you can take some time to get contact information for the companies you found. Watching at their LinkedIn page may help you to get some names of the people you want to talk to (CTO, VP of business development, buyers, CEO ...).

What else ? Do you have other tips to make prospects list ?

B2B sales funnel, follow up and estimate future revenues

The sales funnel

For a B2B companies, following customer contacts and opportunities is a crucial activity.
Many people advocate for classifying customers but without giving a scale to do it...

I think scale may differ depending on the company, but here is the one I built:
  1.  Awareness
  2.  Interested
  3.  Qualified Lead
  4.  Asked for evaluation
  5.  Signed NDA
  6.  Evaluation Sent
 -1. Discarded

It leads to the following sales funnel representation (sorry it does not look like an actual funnel !). Click enlarge it.

What should you do with it ?


1. Keep a centralized version of the funnel (on your favorite CRM, or even on an excel spreadsheet), input each lead into, and input the date at every change of status.

2. Input ALL leads : the ones you get meeting with, but also the visitors of your website (you are using google analytics right ?!), the followers of your twitter corporate account, people you meet at trade shows...

3. Review it every week, sort all leads based on their status: the higher the score, the more recent the last change of status => the higher the priority

4. Take action with the most leads possible (based on their status), obviously starting with the highest priority. Call the evaluators to know how you could help them, send gentle reminders to the one who did not yet send the NDA, keep in touch with interested people...

5. Discard ! When you think there is nothing more to be done with a lead, just discard it... You need to keep your energy for the others.

6. If you need to take a break with a lead (like they say: "ok I am busy now, please contact me in february", or you say "ok, I will send you our next version to be released in one month"), do not forget to add a comments in your funnel, or to set a reminder.

7. Derive metrics from these data. They will help you to track your progress when trying different markets or sales methods. They will also be useful if you try to raise money and want to present the evolution of your company over time...



What could you measure with it ?


More important than the actual figures, you need to track the evolution over time.


1. The number of people entering the funnel.


2. Conversion rates : how many interested people ask an evaluation ? how many evaluators actually buy your product ?

3. Length of your sales cycle : what is the mean time between an expression of interest and a deal made ?

4. Average customer value. How much money do they spend at the end of the funnel ?

Given all these metrics, you will be able to estimate the average value of your sales funnel, and anticipate your future revenues.


What about you ?

Do you have a different sales funnel ?
Do you use it for other purposes ?