Are you looking for ways to build relationships and increase your sales efforts? Developing strong associations is a key ingredient to your sales business and leadership. Getting to know your prospects, their business, and how your product or service can help them is one of the most important parts of your job. As a sales professional, you want to really understand the accounts you want and the people you want to serve. You also want to learn about their business and how you can both be a good fit for each other through your sales prospecting research.
One key to being good at sales is knowing your prospects well and how you can connect and help them. You don’t want to just focus on knowledge about your product or service. Knowing the other side of who can use your services or product is essential to being able to offer these people and companies the best options to solve their problems.
And, knowing as much as you can about the company and contact point at this company can be a fundamental way to get you in the door in the first place!
Sales Prospecting Research
Starting off your prospecting by getting to know the people you can help goes a long way to closing sales. But, it also goes a long way to helping those people that actually need your service or product. Developing a mindset that you are here to help people with what pains them instead of selling your gadgets will enable you to connect with your prospects on a different level. You are here to help. At the same time, you want to be able to reach these people. With more information, you can get closer to making a connection in the first place.
Once you have a list of contacts, you want to dig deeper into who they are, what their business is about, and what role they play in their business. Remember you want your prospects to be a great fit as well as know more details about them as people. You want to know more about them as much as you can so you can relate to them! You want to hit it off right from the beginning!
Research In Sales
This is the time to grow your knowledge about your list. Can they be strong prospects? Will it be a good fit as soon as you meet? What do you have in common? In order to understand them and their business more, layout some places to do your sales prospecting research, read, and put together some questions to research.
Places To Research
- Search Engines
- Company Websites
- Hunter
- Social Media
- Owler
- Other People Connections – People that know the company you are interested in but maybe they don’t directly work there. Maybe they do, but this would be a judgment call on whether to involve them at the beginning of your prospecting research.
Take a look in these areas above to answer some of the questions you have listed.
Target Research
- Can you tell what they need? Can you see what their pain points are? Are they talking about it? Do they have issues but don’t really know it yet? And, make sure this is the pain point you can fix.
- Who are the contacts in the company? Who will most likely be your first call? Accumulate as much info as you can here. If you already have the main contact, research what you can on them so when you reach out you are already familiar with them. And, hopefully, you can narrow down something you both have in common.
- Is the company doing well? Are they having some good numbers this quarter? Do they have a large team? Are they well-established? This can indicate if they will have a budget for what you need. You might even find these figures online.
- Can you find out what projects they are working on? Maybe they are directly interested in fixing what you can solve for them. Get to know what they are up to business and goal-wise.
- If they have a blog on their website you can get some very helpful info there. Their social media can also be a great window into what they are up to recently and how they have grown.
- And, look to their personal info. What are their hobbies and interests? Do they have a family? Are they from the area? What interests them that you can relate to?
Powerful Prospecting Research Technique
This sales prospecting research is a powerful prospecting technique to find out information about a company, its people, how it thinks, and who does what in the business. Most often people in sales struggle with being relevant to their target contact from the get-go because they do not know enough about the situation inside the company in order to make this connection in the first place.
For most prospecting attempts, sales professionals will get the blow-off, or sadly, contacts will avoid them. But when you are able to say something in an email, phone contact, or chance meeting that they can relate to or that touches on specific issues their company faces will enable you to connect quicker and easier.
Being able to directly connect to the situations happening in a company positions you on a familiar platform with the prospect and you can both engage. It can be as easy as something you learned online about how the company is performing or an event they are holding.
You want to come across as if you already have knowledge about them, and understand the uniqueness of their situations….because you do! This well-associated engagement encourages the prospect to want to work with you. This is where the magic is as you can build on a dynamic relationship from here.
Ready To Learn More Powerful Sales Techniques?!
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