Cold calling essentials: use your prospect’s website to turn your cold call into a warm call
Posted by Geoff Alexander on Mon, Jun 08, 2009 @ 01:00 AM
I'm conducting one of my telesales training courses this week for a network solutions company that has a challenge common to many inside sales organizations, namely cold calling into companies where there has been no prior telephone contact, at any level. In some cases, there are individuals that have downloaded whitepapers, attended tradeshows and seminars, or signed up for webinars, but in most cases, there has been no previous "touch" at all. In calling these companies, it's absolutely critical to mine the prospect's website for clues that can be used to turn the cold call into a warm call.
There are several critical things you can find by visiting your prospect's homepage, and you can do it all in three minutes or fewer (if it takes longer, you'll never meet your call metrics, so you have to know what to look for, and how to find it). You'll want to focus on your solution, and find clues on the website indicating that the prospect company could have a need. If you sell application development tools, for example, you'll look for indicators that the prospect is building applications; if your prospect is selling its own applications on its website, you now have additional ammunition you need to make a more meaningful opening call.
Here are a few classic web elements that are indicators that the prospect could potentially use a solution like yours, if you provide development or networking solutions, as an example. If you don't sell these types of solutions, you can use this as a template to create a list of your own "hot" web indicators for your solution. Look for elements such as these that you can refer to when engaging your new "cold" prospect:
- Bill paying capability
- Online account management
- Order entry
- Reseller portal
- Taxes or auto registration
- Shipment tracking
In addition, scan the homepage for any corporate news that could be valuable, such as acquisitions or mergers, or press releases or whitepapers mentioning the thoughts and ideas of upper-level management. This data will be critical when calling high, and again, turns your cold call into a warm call.
Your prospect's website is invaluable in telling you how the company makes its money. As I've said many times, prospects will only buy solutions if they will help the company to make money, or stop losing money. To build rapport and begin strategizing an ROI-based sales formula with your prospects, learn these three things from your website research:
- what product or service your prospect company sells
- who buys its products and services
- how its customers buy those products and services
And last but not least, check the Management page to determine the name of the appropriate CXO. It's better than any other source on the internet, because it's always current.
If you take the steps I've outlined in this post, you'll find your cold calls go a lot better, because you've taken some important steps that prove to your prospect that you know his or her company well enough to make an intelligent value proposition based on intelligence instead of guesswork. Remember to take 3 minutes or fewer per prospect (the more you do it, the more efficient you'll get), and add this powerful technique to your Best Practices playbook.