Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Business Conversations Equal More Sales Opportunities

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

I have worked with a number of clients over the course of my 9 years in the teleprospecting industry and something we are continuously asked by our clients is, “Our technology is very complex, will your team be able to adequately understand our entire solution?”

My answer is always the same; on the front end of the sales process our goal is to have what we classify as a “business conversation” not a “technology conversation” and our team members are extremely adept at having these “business conversations”.

I go on to explain further that what is more critical then understanding every part of a solution is the ability to have a “business conversation” with a target prospect.

So you may ask, what do you mean by “business conversation?”  This is a conversation that has set goals an inside sales representative is looking to accomplish:

1. Uncover what is going on today? (company, technology in place, etc)
2. What are the problems that they face today or foresee in the future?(budget shrink, technology specific gaps – e.g. ERP is not robust enough for future growth, etc)
3. How do they envision fixing the problems and when?

If these goals are met, an inside sales rep should be able to disposition the target prospect “in” or “out” as a potential opportunity. 

I am a firm believer that in order to uncover an opportunity an individual must be comfortable with the product or material he/she is speaking about.  Product knowledge is important but the pieces below fall higher on the list. 

Some of the material or information we ask of our clients when we engage are as follows: being able to understand what areas of an organization a product can help, who the target audience is, what concerns the target audience has in their specific role (CIO versus Systems Administrator), objections an inside sales rep will face and how to overcome them, and finally, perhaps most importantly, is a high level understanding of the space the solution fits in (e.g. Virtualization – what is it, why are people doing it, etc)

Armed with this type of background, the skill set to listen and digest what you are hearing and the ability to think on your feet, an inside sales rep is ready to generate opportunities that will lead to more “business conversations” and forecasted revenue.