Symptoms:
Janie really wanted to nail this tele selling thing, she had all tabs loaded on her screen, put on a clean shirt and armed herself with all of the background info she researched on the prospects website. As she got ready to start a conference call.
She felt good, except after reviewing the website information, LinkedIn and Facebook posts, she really didn't know what she had to offer or what the prospect was interested in.
According to the information available to her, the prospects company was doing great and already had the best vendors as partners. Nothing online indicated a pressing need for much of anything that Janie could provide. So in this sales call of these weird working conditions, Janie really had no idea what to do other than to start talking about her company, their products and how they are handling working right now.
Diagnosis:
Doing research online is a good tactic, but rarely offers much that is specific enough about any company's challenges or problems that might be usable on a sales call. After all, why would a firm air dirty laundry or publicize struggles they were experiencing with anyone who might click a link and visit their site? Janie had great experience utilizing the web to gather general information, but she over-estimated what secret nuggets might be found from deep diving into her prospect's site. According to this same site, things were better than ever, which didn't leave much for Janie to do other than throw stuff at the wall and hope something would stick.
Prescription:
Real opportunities are found by understanding the real business process a prospective client lives with day in and day out. Knowing about the industry rather than a particular company could have provided Janie with more information about what to explore on her initial call. Using website data to speculate about problems or issues could be too assumptive.
A better way to find out where you might create value is to find out what customers think of your target and see where they might be able to improve performance. You might also look into industry based sites that talk about challenges all people in the business are dealing with. Looking for a company to tell you about their words on their own website will only lead to frustration.
Critical Thinking:
It is super easy to get caught up in the world of online browsing and researching right now. Why not keep clicking through links and websites in hopes of finding something useful? Maybe take a break and do a little shopping. You never know what you're going to do on the internet. So are you tracking how much time you are really prospecting and making connections verse prospecting by research? Have you found a way to help keep you on task in this web based selling and networking time we're in?
The Drill
Final Thought for the Morning:
"Less scrolling, more living."
"Content comprehension suffers when you're looking through a peephole because there's little visible context. The less you can see the more you have to remember. And human short term memory is notoriously weak." ~ Jacob Nielsen
Your Top 3 Goals & Tactics for the Week
LAST WEEK: Update us on how things went last week with your stated Goals and GD Tactics.
THIS WEEK: Please share your Top 3 Goals for this week and the GD tactics you plan to deploy.
