Prospecting Without Cold Calling: 2009 Best Practices

Nov. 14, 2009 - PRLog -- Increasingly Difficult To Reach Decision Makers

It comes as no surprise to anyone that reaching target decision makers today is harder than ever before. You Know That! With the Internet and the explosive growth of Business and Social Media, there has been a dramatic change in the way companies buy, because buyers are so well informed. They can find out virtually any information they want about a product or service without the help of a sales person.

Cold Calling Isn't Working Anymore!

So for most companies, Cold Calling down lists trying to reach C-Level decision makers isn't profitable anymore. Having a hot new product isn't enough. You still need to get in front of the people that have the authority to make buying decisions about the products and services you sell.

Countless Social Media Tools To Choose From

The good news is that there are thousands of Web 2.0 and Social Media tools on the market to help get your products and services in front of target decision makers and there are countless new tools being released every day.

Sorting Through The Clutter and Confusion

The challenge is that the market is so flooded with social media tools that they've lost their uniqueness, and companies are left trying to sort through the clutter and confusion to determine which of these solutions, if any, meet their unique business needs.

The Best Social Media / Social Networking Tools On The Market

David Kalstrom, President of Outbound Excellence, says "We've removed the clutter and confusion of identifying the best B2B Electronic Sales Intelligence Tools, by developing an electronic dashboard panel that allowed us to quickly and effectively test the Top 140 Social Media / Social Networking Tools on the market."

We have identified the following applications as the top applications on the market for helping B2B companies prospect more effectively for new business.  

2009 Top Social Media  Social Networking: Applications / Tools

1) Sales View - Sales Intelligence Category

SalesView provides all the sales lead information that the other top sales lead sources provide, including Hoovers, D&B, RefUSA, Jigsaw and Netprospex.  But it provides a number of other sales intelligence components that the other services don't provide.  

These Sales Intelligence components include:

a) Reporting Structure: Including  CEO, CXO, SR VP, VP, Dir and even down to the manager.  The reporting structure is unique in the fact that it is laid out in a vertical organization chart format.  

b) Business Networking  Social Networking: If a contact has a profile in a top Business Networking site such as LinkedIn, there is a link directly from the listing in SalesView directly to the contact's profile in LinkedIn.

c) News Feeds: Simply type in the name of a company and the system will search the internet and retrieve current news articles.  It will then categorize them in up to 14 separate categories for easy analysis.  In 80% of these news releases there is a quote by a C-Level Executive providing a valid business reason to contact each prospect account.

2) Group Mail & Group Metrics: Email Reporting & Tracking Software

Most companies today use a quality reporting and tracking service such as Constant Contact or Vertical Response, and these are both very effective services.  But the 2009 Best Practices in the Email Reporting and Tracking Software category are GroupMail and Group Metrics.  

There are a number of reasons that these applications are this year's Top Rated Products:

a) Lower Cost: These are applications verses services so you only pay one time for the application verses the monthly fee for a service.  

b) Real Time Data: The key to Prospecting Without Cold Calling is having the ability to "Quickly" - Electronically Identify Target Prospects That Have An Interest In Your Products and Services and then "Leverage" the electronic intelligence to contact the target prospect while your solution is at the top of their mind / peak of their interest.

With a service, the average time between when a target prospect clicks on an embedded link in an e-marketing document, indicating an interest in your product / services, and the time they are contacted by a sales person, is 3-5 business days.

This makes sense when you consider that with a service you must log into the service, open the campaign, export the data, import it into your database, cleanse the data, separate it by assigned sales representative, transfer and communicate the data to the sales person, then the sales person has to work the contacts into their existing schedule and make the contact.

In most cases, the lag time between the moment the target prospect clicks on an embedded link and the moment they get a follow-up call, reduces the ability of the sales representative by up to 80% to immediately engage the target decision maker in a meaningful qualification discussion.

With Group Mail & Group Metrics, if set up properly, the data is fed in real time into the sales organization.  Within seconds of a target prospect opening an emarketing document, the action is reported in a desktop window.

With these applications, a company can view the actions of a target prospect, while the prospect is viewing the e-document.  As a target prospect clicks on various links within the document, the application records the sequence of actions and provides them in real time.  It also has a built in scoring system so that the prospects with the greatest level of interest can be prioritized for call backs and follow up marketing.

With minimal configuring the system will not only provide the contact's email information and specific areas of interest, but it will also provide each prospect's full contact information.

The many benefits that this "real time" data provides include:

1) Verification of an active contact
2) Likely probability the contact is in house and at their desk
3) While the prospect is viewing the document research on the contact can be conducted
4) A follow-up call can be made to the prospect when your products and services are at the top of their mind / peak of their interest

3) BrightTALK - Social Media

BrightTALK is a web casting platform.  It is not a webconferencing application such as Web-x, Go To Meeting or Live Meeting.  BrightTALK is specifically designed for one reason and that is to be a lead generation application.  

Here's how BrighTALK electronically identifies target prospects:

a) BrightTALK promotes each of the webcasts presented on its platform
b) Over 30,000 C-Level Executives view webcasts on BrightTALK each month
c) There are 50 social media components built into the back end of each channel
d) The system automatically creates a banner ad announcement for each webcast
e) The webcasts can be automatically posted into 50 LinkedIn groups per day
f) The announcements can also be automatically submitted to 49 other sites
g) The system automatically sends out webcast announcements and reminders
h) Webcasts are automatically recorded and 6x the people that watch a live webcast
watch the recorded version.    

Prospecting Web 3.0 Cold Calling Is Dead takes today’s most effective Social Media tools and integrates them into a system that allows Sales Organizations to Prospect More Effectively for New Business.

Outbound Excellence's turn key service is priced at $1495 and guarantees to provide you  with the full contact information and the specific areas of interest of 100 target prospects that electronically identify themselves as having an interest in your products and services.  

If you're interested in how to identify 100 Target Prospects Without Cold Calling, contact
David Kalstrom at Outbound Excellence 877-337-2674.

Here is a link to view a webcast of Prospecting Web 3.0 Cold Calling Is Dead:
http://www.brighttalk.com/webcasts/7446/attend

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We Develop Tools To Improve Sales Force Effectiveness Using A Lean Six Sigma Methodology - We've automated the process - providing pre-developed and pre-proven -plug n' play processes - that provide an immediate financial gain to the organization.