Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 3

Most organizations (if not all) require the use of a CRM tool - be it for monitoring, organizing accounts, keeping notes, etc. I personal think it was the best creation since sliced bread and have used tools ranging from the ever popular Saleforce.com, Sugar CRM, Siebel, ACT!, Upshot.com (yes I am that old - this was probably one of the first CRM's in the early 2000's), Excel (yes some organizations are that archaic!), etc. The one thing I think all of them are missing is a feature to develop a hierarchy of an organization. So at a quick glance/view, you as the key account manager can quickly know where the person is on the chain of decision making, holding the purse strings, influence, etc. Until that gets invented (or may have but I don't know), I have created a formula of my own to help me manage my accounts.

Organizing your contact lists

This is especially great In complex sales as you tend to speak with multiple people and don't know the interrelationships (matrixed organization).  It gets hard to keep track of who reports to who in the hierarchy, and remembering names of the different people in the organization.  I’ve devised a simple technique that’s easy to implement and if looking at your CRM, you can easily identify who each person is.  I’ll give you an example (sorry for the editing):

	1 - CEO
2A - VP of IT	2B - VP of Sales	2C - VP of Marketing
3A - Director of IT	3B - Director of Sales	3C - Director of Marketing
4A - IT Manager	4B - Sales Manager	4C - Marketing Manager
5A - Systems Administrator	5B - Sales Rep	5C - Intern

The number is the hierarchy within the organization and the letter refers to the department they belong in.  It’s a very easy technique that helps in knowing how senior or junior a person is and the relationship in the hierarchy of the whole organization. I've not assigned a letter to a specific department, but you can implement them as you go - if you know of two people in the organization place these tags on them. I'll show you how I place them:

Name Athar Afzal  
Title: 3B - Director of Sales

Note: Always place it in the first part of the title and not their name. Name because if you sent them an email through your CRM it would show the tag. First part of the title as you read from left to right and it becomes easier to see it first.

Summary of Market Segmentation

I thoroughly enjoyed talking about the topic of the week on market segmentation. Yes, there is a lot of work to do before prospecting, but I believe there is great value in doing this to work less and achieve more. Look forward to comments!

Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 2

 How to find and make a targeted account list (FOR FREE!!)

When you begin to work on expanding your sales pipeline - the first sales technique to implement is to know who to call as this can save you a number of hours of calling and achieving nothing. There are a number of sources you can use to get your lists for free, but before you start - please make sure you have completed the previous tip of identifying your target market.  

Having mostly done B2B sales in Canada, I have retrieved my lists from sources relevant to the Canadian markets, here are a few I have used for the Toronto area:

• Top 1000 public companies - list of companies measured by revenue (you do have other options to try
• Top 350 private companies - look for companies that are 100% owned by one entity or family (ex. Jim Pattison Group, Home Hardware, etc.)
• Scotts Directory - free-trial on-line or you can obtain unlimited use at some Canadian local libraries, employment centers, or municipal business centers.

In addition, for international markets, try these:

• Wikipedia - list of companies listed by categories (ex: geographic regions, industries, etc.), narrow down from that list, or you can simply write "list of companies in __(state region/location)__"
• Linkedin - this link takes you to the 'search companies' tab, you can specify and it will show all the companies registered with linkedin throughout the world. On the left there is a deeper dive where you can narrow by other categories, these are the ones I like: 
• Location - you can be as broad as saying 'United States' to as narrow as a small city like 'Albany, New York, United States'.
• Industry - this is an easy one to select because it will be your target market - like healthcare, education, etc.
• Company Size - really important as are you selling in the SMB or enterprise space.

There are others, namely Jigsaw and Hoover's, which I shall write in a future blog.

General formula for calculating a size of a company

A rule of thumb I use is revenues by companies - typically for every $300MM in annual revenues there are approximately 1000 employees.  I find this to be the most useful statistic than the profit margin or amount of profit made.  You can of course do the math (proportional math? I forget the name) - so if a company claims they have 50 employees - they are probably $15MM in annual revenues.  

Market size is much larger than you think 

There are many other resources you can use to find companies, one thing I’ve always underestimated in any role is the scope of the market is larger than I initially estimated.  That’s probably due to the fact that the developers of products & services are usually not the salespeople (unless they are the founders) they are more the ‘technicians’, who have had experience in their field and made the product/service to overcome those challenges that come in their role.


Thanks - this week I will probably post one more blog - look forward to feedback!

Market Segmentation - Steps to take before Cold-Calling - Tip # 1

Hope everybody had a great weekend (or is having if you are in Canada!) and are pumped up for a great week ahead of opening up new doors of opportunities!  


This week the focus is slightly different than what I have been talking about - on best practices of cold-calling - this week the focus is how to go about preparing your target prospecting list. It’s a beneficial cold-calling technique I have learned that can enable you to do fewer dials for more meetings.  This is also a continuation of a previous blog I had written, which you can view here.

Facing a shrinking prospecting list?

What does this mean? Well - it is a phenomenon I call ‘constant refinement’, which means that as you start to go through your target list, identifying opportunities, it starts to become harder (by law of numbers) to keep finding more opportunities within the same list.  Say you start with a list of 1000 prospects to call, as you dig for the nuggets of gold and find them, the next nugget becomes harder to find as you have started to shrink your base of prospects. So you always have to be on the lookout for new accounts to target.

Let’s start - so the first part of your prospect list is to know who your target audience is.  

Identify your target market and familiarize yourself with it.

In other words - who is and who will be buying my product/service.  This is done by keeping an eye on the trends of your product/service in the marketplace.  What market does your product/service serve best with and are there up and coming new markets that might also benefit from your product/service?  

Find industries to target (low hanging fruit).

You can achieve this by finding out the easiest companies to sell your product / service to (low hanging fruit), then prioritize it to the next 'higher' hanging fruit, and so on.  This helps you as you can start to narrow the time spent learning about your product/service.  If you know have the answer, then start to study that particular industry, current events (news), customer case studies, etc.  


Its this preparation that’s very valuable as when you speak to your prospect, you can always include in your call “...would like to offer you the same as we’ve done with [XYZ customer - someone in their industry]...”.  This third party credibility is very helpful for establishing immediate trust.


Hope this is helpful to eveyone! Look forward to comments or questions.

Preventing hang-ups when cold-calling - Tip # 5

Last post on the topic of preventing hang-ups (at least for the time being):

Apologize

When you have disturbed someone catching them off-guard - it is likely going to make them a bit irritable.  I've found the best way to diffuse this is by apologizing (and sometimes profusely!).  It bring you down to a natural human nature - in essence telling them that you are down to earth.  It's all about tonality (and I should put an audio file of myself saying it - but not too sophisticated yet!), the way I say it is "Oh, I'm sorry" and this goes a long way of keeping them from hanging up.

Then I say one of the following after apologizing:

• I didn't realize this is your area of expertise

• I must have not had my records up to date

• I probably mixed you up with someone else, etc.

The only thing, I don't apologize about is taking up their time, I never say "sorry to take your time/disturb your day, etc.".  Why - there is no point, you are in the sales profession and you are going to take up their time.  It's almost as if you are apologizing for choosing your profession  - don't - be proud of it!

This ends the series on my tips on preventing hang-ups while cold-calling, I hope it's been valuable.  I have appreciated the feedback I have gotten so far and look forward to more.

Have a great weekend folks!

Preventing hang-ups when cold-calling - Tip # 4

The next tip I will be sharing is an extremely controversial one and something that I have been told can backfire.  Nevertheless - I still use it!  Why, after the warning above?  Well because, it hasn't backfired and I'll explain why.  Let's reveal tip #4...


Mention someone else's name as a reference

What does this mean - well for starters it means that you can build your credibility by mentioning to the recipient that you are calling as 'so and so' asked you call them up.  Why this is controversial is that maybe you never spoke to a 'so and so' and randomly picked their name up!  How do you get this name?  I typically select someone that has left the organization, you can find them from the following sources:

• Linkedin - go to the company tab and on the right there is a place where you can see "Check out insightful statistics...", once you go there you can view the departures from the company
• Jigsaw (now owned by salesforce.com) - if you are familiar with it, you can get names from the graveyard, which is free to retrieve
• If neither of the above work, then I select a name of a person in the company that works in another department because you can say they thought you might be the right person

This is controversial no doubt, but I view this is a way to get you foot in the door!  Comments (am sure - there are going to be a few!).

Preventing hang-ups when cold-calling - Tip # 3

Hump day! Hope your week is going well - this one is short, so here is tip #3:


Ask a thought provoking Question: 


The third part of preventing a hung-up on a cold-call is to come up with a question, this is harder as it must fall into the following logical parameters:

• Must be broad enough for them to know the answer, but yet narrow enough that it relates to your product/service. 
• Has to be an open-ended question, but again not too open ended that other person would have to spend more than a minute answering you
• Something that they would feel compelled to answer.

Now the above is more subjective than objective, but try to internalize the points above to see what I mean by them.  Once you've done that, you will start to realize this is more scientific as you are going to develop a hypothesis and then test it out till you get the right questions.  It doesn't have to be a long complicated statement, perhaps between 1-3 words can get the right question.  Good luck!

Preventing hang-ups when cold-calling - Tip # 2

Let's continue with more helpful tips on preventing hang-ups, so here is tip #2:


MAKE A MISTAKE!


I have found this to be extremely helpful.  Why?  Because inherently people like to correct others - so if you are in a call - make sure you purposely make a mistake as the other caller instead of hanging up will try to correct you.  By doing this, your goal is to do the following:

• increase phone time and have them become warmer to you
• get them to speak more
• gives them the upper hand of feeling special by making them feel they know more

When all of the above happen, then they might drop their guard and let you have a better chance of letting you ptich to them.


How do you make the mistake, here are some suggestions:

• So it needs to be carefully planned, one of the easiest ways I have done it is by calling someone else other than my target person within the same department and make a mistake that assumed they would be handling the responsibility.
• If you know of a fact about the company, make a mistake by stating the opposite of the fact, for example, you can say that they had looked into a similar product or service but make a mistake on the reason why they didn't go for it.

Anybody have some more ideas?  Any agreement/disagreements?

Preventing hang-ups when cold-calling - Tip # 1

This week I wanted to do something different - as part of my strategy on helping people improve their sales by increasing their pipeline, I am going to pick one topic and discuss it for the week in bite size chunks.  Hopefully this should make the reading a lot more easier to digest!


Starting off this week, I would like to share tips on how to prevent hang-ups with cold-calling.  Sounds far-fetched?  Of course!  But over the years, I have noticed that I no longer get hang-ups that frequently and while self-reflecting, I wanted to share a tip each day of this week on how I've been able to overcome this.  Comments of course welcome (you are welcome to agree or disagree) and am sure most people know these methods, but let's summarize some.


ASSUME ALWAYS - DON'T ASK FOR PERMISSION!


In many cold-calling trainings I have taken, trainers have insisted that this is the way you start a conversion:


"Good morning/afternoon________, my name is _______ from __[XYZ]___ Company, do you have a few minutes to speak?"


Errrrr, I get so frustrated when that is asked to initiate a sales call.  Why do we ask for permission to speak - yes I realize people are busy, but you are immediately giving away power to the other person, a chance of denying you the opportunity to pitch.  After trying this tactic out and experiencing failure upon failure, I decided to change MY mindset to the call and assumed they wanted to speak with me.  


But before I share this with you, it's important to note, don't approach the call from an angle of mentioning your product name or service or telling them the value of it.  Instead, start with a pitch like this:


"Good morning/afternoon ______, my name is_______ from ____[XYZ]___ Company, calling in regards to discussing ____[what the product/service actual does do, don't go into a detailed conversation on the savings, efficiencies, or what you call your product]____.  Are you or have you looked into implementing that in your organization?"


I feel this is a much better starting point of a conversation.  Comments/opinions?

Handling long stretches of rejection when cold-callling.

There was a comment on a recent blog I had done on how do you handle long stretches of continuous rejection.  Is it time to change strategy or is it a numbers game?  It came in from an 'Anonymous', so I want to thank the person as I think it creates better conversations and at the end I hope we can all help each other out and improve our conversion ratios.  If you haven't had the chance please read it first here.


First off, I am going to start to answer the question - the answer is...it can be both or even something else!  Sorry, I know you wanted something straight forward, but it depends on your unique situation / scenario.  I will try to present what I mean by each of the possible scenarios I have experienced and you are welcome to add to these.


Numbers and strategy game - yes both are true; however, before you start pounding the phone even more aggressively to generate the calls/meetings when experiencing a dry patch, examine the downward trend and what led to it.  For example, if it took you 'X' calls to get 'Y' number of appointments and you're now at '4X' calls and 0 appointments, then perhaps one or some of the following might be preventing you from going further:

• Target list - many a times, you've gone through the target list and you go through it again and again, if you keep up doing that your conversion ratios are going to weaken.  If you are at that point, I would advise you to try and develop a new target list, perhaps changing the industry, geography, size of companies (move to larger or smaller ones) as by now you've had quite a bit of experience in knowing the full value of the product/service you are pitching. 

• Competition - may have changed and a competitor may have introduced a product that better fits the market.  In the age of cloud computing, it's becoming easier for companies to sign shorter term contracts, provide a free promotional period, offer more versions of the product to offer flexible payment options.  You want to find out these and communicate it to the marketing and management teams to see where it would be most wisest to spend marketing dollars towards. 

• Market forces - is there really a demand for your product/service?  Many a times sales people get hired and the quota they are assigned is not based on demand by the market, but growth required to satisfy investors.  Remember in order to justify your quota - there HAS to be sufficient demand of your product.  For example, years ago I had a brief stint in selling accounting software specific to the construction industry.  Now the software was based out of Oregon, but my territory was the Greater Toronto Area.  It didn't sell nowhere close to target - why?  Well, no construction company in the East coast was savy enough to buy such an expensive tool as it was too advanced for them, while companies on the West coast were comfortable using it.  You might be in an industry that is too early on, either weigh it out or take the difficult step of moving out of selling this to somewhere else. 

Sometimes, sales don't go in the direction we'd like them to go, I would say give it one more shot, then go with your gut rather than exerting more pressure on yourself to work harder.  Take a step back and soul-search how you can better sell it OR it might be time to move on.  Comments...

Overcoming frustration while cold-calling for leads.

You are all excited about starting a day where you are going to start filling up your pipeline (as you may have won / lost deals and it's time to replenish).  These would be new opportunities / relationships opening up doors for you to understand what new interesting and exciting things are going on in this world.   So you start, during your allocated time to call up your target accounts - motivated and blocking out all non-productive thoughts.  You do this for a few days, weeks, months - call, no answer, call no answer, you get the pattern!  So how does one stay so motivated while overcoming this block?


1. Prep work (research) - Do lots of this and the best time is to do it during the evenings or weekends (I know a salesperson never stops working!).  What you want to try and find:

• Description - get a brief summary of what the company does
• Call List - get 3-5 contacts (based on their position titles)
• Phone numbers - you can always call these numbers at night and right down the prompts using 'dial-by-name' directory to get you to speak to person as fast as possible. 

2.  Mindset - this is a challenge as you are staring at a near empty pipeline and it's hard to come down off your past laurels of success - and rejection is the last thing you want to see!  Try to shift the mindset and think of yourself as a detective (like CSI, James Bond, or even Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She wrote!).  As a detective, you are trying to uncover challenges your target account is going through, through careful questioning, you can identify their pain-points and pitch accordingly.


3.  Numbers - a lot of sales organizations tell you "it's a numbers game", but how do you implement it?  To motivate you before every call, motivate yourself.  It might sound funny, but it can get you excited to speak with  a prospect if you say the following:

• One dial/call closer to an opportunity! (it is the law of numbers, if someone picks up after 8 dials, say T-X number of dials left!)
• This is the prospects lucky day to get a call on a valuable product/service they didn't know about!
• This call is worth 'X' number of $$$ for me - it's quick math, but take your average deal size and divide by how many calls it took to get it (guess this number) and put a value on the call.  Write it down if you have to and imagine it coming into your bank account.

I hope this has been helpful to you as it is for me.  It's about making it more fun and productive to get your pipeline filled.  Please share more ideas!

Matching and mirroring in a cold-call

So, I got a comment (the first ever!) on one of my blog posts and thought it would be an interesting discussion to begin this post with - in a cold-call how important is matching and mirroring?  Many people say that in order to carry a conversation in a cold-call (or any sales call) matching and mirroring the prospect is key or should be considered a major strategy.  What I would like to present are 3 reasons that warrant a discussion on the merits of match and mirror in a phone call.  If I have missed any or if anyone would like to add - please comment!


Intimidation - in my world and experience of selling to technical people, they are typically not aversed in sales and so they get intimidated with the salesguy that's speaking with them ESPECIALLY if you are over-energized!  In this scenario, I try to lower my energy, the challenge here is if you get too low, you don't sound too exciting to speak with.  VERDICT - find a fine balance and during the phone call try to slowly increase your energy level (by standing up from chair, pacing, etc.).  It would be interesting if this matches other industries though. 


Genuineness or humbleness - if you look at sales, it's the formation of a relationship with another person.  When you are in a relationship - you are there because of who that person is and accept them for who they are.  If you take a look around at your circle of professional friendships (not personal), you'll notice that there is a wide variety of people from different backgrounds, but yet we all get along very well.  It's about getting to know the person inside and appreciating them - and that's what ultimately gets the long-term relationship sale!


Personality matches - people require information differently based on their natural or adjusted styles (adjusted being in response to their environment).  The one I use is the DISC profile, which is fairly easy and simple tool to use as it divides people up in 4 categories.  It might be difficult to gauge people on a phone call, but senior people are probably more likely to be dominant, while researchers, accountants, etc. are more likely to be cautious fact oriented (you can read more about it at here at the Wikipedia article).  By guessing, you can be good at matching and mirroring the language and tone of the conversation.  


While, I have not answered the question on the importance of matching and mirroring, I think the clear answer is go with your gut as you don't want to sway yourself in too much of a different direction.  I leave this blog with the following question, if you were selling to someone, who was an exact replica of you and no matching and mirroring was required - do you think they'd buy?