June 2011

Today's salesperson has more ways than ever to reach out to potential new clients. Effectiveness and cost tend to rise together. Without a doubt, the most effective, yet most costly way of closing a sales lead is an in-person sales call. The least costly but least effective is mass marketing.

Today, we'll focus on the second, which is often neglected by salespeople because it sounds like ... COLD CALLING!

Cold calling is tedious and time-consuming, but remains a crucial part of the sales process. If your highly compensated sales reps aren't making enough of these calls, your company's top line will suffer. Either implement the management controls you need to ensure proper telesales prospecting frequency, or consider funding an ongoing telesales effort.

It's been nearly a year since Grow Sales, Inc. launched our telesales service. Here are three examples of what we've done for clients:

Goal

• Identify and qualify new prospects

Actions

• Define success - usually number of quoting opportunities from new prospects or inactive customers
• Compile a strategic list of prospects from multiple sources
• Prioritize the list with our client
• Develop "talking points" document that will help telesales professional stay on-message and move conversation toward prospect qualification
• Create appropriate follow-up electronic collateral
• Uncover buying needs, potential sales objections, competitors used, and other vital information that will help fully qualify each prospect
• Immediately turn over all new leads to client.

Results

• Hundreds of job quoting opportunities from dozens of new or reactivated companies, which has led to profitable, repeatable work.

Goal

• Gather market data to assist in launch of new product
• Competitive product analysis
• Pricing (our status as a third-party research firm certainly helped!)

Actions

• Compile a strategic list of competitors that offer products similar to client's new offering
• Uncover and report information, which client can use to help determine their product specifications and pricing model

Results

• Obtained useful product and pricing information from 15 of 25 competitors

Goal

• Get a client's existing customers to attend a user group community meeting

Actions

• Select targeted customers
• Develop a simple reporting system for recording daily call results. In this case, we created a 0-5 system where 5 = the person will register and 0 = leaving a voicemail or no interest.

Results

• We'd received firm commitments from 20 people and strong interest from 50 more within two weeks.

What Can Grow Sales Do for You?
Need help navigating the treacherous telesales jungle? GSI's telesales/market research/prospect qualification service is focused on helping businesses successfully navigate the suspect/prospect funnel and turn key contacts into promising leads and new business. We are now offering this service as a key component of our ever-evolving comprehensive suite of sales growth services or as a stand-alone. Give us a call at (301) 294-9900 to learn more.

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