As a business consultant to more than 30 different Fortune 500 organizations, one of the most interesting things that I experience is watching the hypocrisy of business organizations when it comes to the selling process, particularly cold calling.
On the one hand, most business organizations deploy a team of sales professionals trying their hardest to develop new relationships and generate revenues to hit their sales targets. Concurrently, that very same business organization is a buying organization of decision makers to which other outside sales professionals are trying their hardest prospecting, cold calling, and selling.
So here is the question of the day: How many times in a day does a typical decision maker say no to or ignore cold calling efforts while their own sales people are doing the very same thing and expecting results? The answer is close to infinity…
The purpose of this blog is to suggest that business decision makers learn to respect the sales professionals who are cold calling on them and to dedicate a few moments a day to some of their efforts. I use the word “some” here as a qualifier. Clearly you can’t spend time on all of the hundreds of touches that you receive in a day, but how about five?
The qualification process should be:
- Is it a quality, well designed, and insightful touch? If so, then maybe this sales professional has something valuable to share.
- Is the product/service that the sales professional is selling something important to your value proposition to your customers?
- Did the sales professional leverage a mutual relationship and case study that interests you?
If you have qualified a few of these touches as interesting and potentially adding insight and value to your world and business, then here are four benefits that you can receive from spending a few minutes understanding these touches more.
You may learn something
A good, well trained sales professional has a process of quickly sharing insights and a value proposition or thought leadership with you. A few minutes listening to the value proposition could teach you something new that potentially could add value. Remember this: your most trusted and closest vendors/partners were once complete strangers! In fact, one of our partners, Richardson, offers a great sales training course called Selling with Insights.
Find out what are new best practices
Listening to new information and ways of doing things in your industry may teach you about new best practices. It could also teach you about things that your competitors are doing that you aren’t.
Fine-tune your own messaging
One of the things that I do on a regular basis is review all of the prospecting emails and calls to learn about what works and what doesn’t work so that we can fine-tune our own messaging. Every once in a while I discover something new or interesting that I use to adapt into our approach. For example, I know of one vendor who always leaves a video message embedded in his email. I watched a few and thought it was pretty cool.
Find new sales people
One of my clients shared with me that one of his company’s best recruiting tools is identifying high quality sales people to recruit and bring into the company through reviewing their cold calls and emails.
In summary, outside sales efforts can seem like a hassle, but think of what your own sales people are trying to do every day as well. Give a sales professional calling on you a chance…it may enhance your value proposition.