I think it really hasn’t. You see, back when I was a rookie salesman at IBM we had two ways to generate leads for ourselves.
One, we knocked on a door or two, we picked up the phone and made a call.
It was a rare day indeed when someone called in and asked to speak with a salesman.
For those of you who made a living cold calling was a way of life and we all knew it was a numbers game.
A numbers game. Is that much different that what we’re doing today? Except the numbers are different. Instead of numbers of phone calls or door knocks, it’s number of tweets and followers, number of blog posts and rss readers, number of subscribers to our email list.
To me that means the methods of sales prospecting haven’t really changed. We put ourselves out there looking for a prospect. But not just any prospect, a qualified prospect!
So if I have a list of 10,000 people that are on my email list which one should I call first?
This is where the email strategy for sales prospecting comes in. If I want to find which person could be a candidate for me, I need to get them to show, through their actions they might be a good fit.
Simple method one. Send a link to a case study demonstrating the COST SAVINGS your product generated for Client A. OR Send a link to a case study demonstrating the PRODUCTIVITY GAINS your product generated for Client B.
I think that you will notice that from the different benefits (cost savings vs productivity gains) you will get a different type of prospect.
You might already know that productivity gains is your ideal sales prospect–so you can select them first.
That type of sales prospecting is much like we did in the old days except we’d say it on the phone instead of posting it in a blog.
I’m curious. How do you think sales prospecting has changed in the past 30 years?