Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Dave Landry, professional business writer and personal finance advisor. 

Building strong client relationships is perhaps one of the most important things that any marketer can accomplish, especially given the increasing importance of having a popular and well-known brand in today’s cluttered B2B landscape.

Branding For Unity

A powerful brand can help lead to the development of a community that has a positive effect on customers and employees alike. Strong emotions regarding a company will affect purchasing decisions from potential clients, but will also promote pride in their work from employees. And even more importantly, customer support really is everyone’s job, particularly in high-end B2B markets where solutions are hardly a one-time purchase.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest blog from Greg Klingshirn, Content Marketing Manager at SalesLoft. 

Cold calls are the bread and butter of successful sales development reps. But what about the times you call and don’t get an answer? Leaving a message is a hard starting point to a demo or qualified appointment.

Instead of being dejected when you don’t get an answer, use it to your advantage. When you’re confident in voicemail, prospects that don’t answer can be your silver bullet.

Leave a voicemail to remember with these five tips:

If you’re in sales, a lot of your time is spent on the phone -- outbound prospecting, inbound qualifying, cold calling, you name it. You may have a list of questions you want to ask your prospect, and you may have a roadmap for the direction you want your conversation to go. However, what happens when your prospect doesn’t answer the phone?

You’ll need to leave a voicemail that doesn’t get ignored or deleted immediately. If the average voicemail response rate is 4.8% according to InsideSales, how can you generate enough interest in prospects that they call you back?

What if I told you the secret to getting cold prospects to always open and even act on your sales emails? 

Here it is: There is no secret. 

The truth is, every prospect is different, so there's no guaranteeing that one best practice will work above all others. What you can do to build trust with cold prospects is be honest and provide real value in every email interaction you have with them. 

That's why this cold sales email template works so well: 

Sales managers, how often are you evaluating your inside sales team’s messaging techniques? You may have given them the tools to get started, but are they able to craft their own templates for emails voicemails? Are you constantly training them on new social selling techniques?

Just the other day, I sat down with our sales team for a role play. After an hour-long session, they walked out of my office with a better idea of how to target our buyers with tailored messaging specific to them. You see, most sales and marketing professionals just don’t have time. “No, I don’t want to tell you the challenges in my environment and what my company does. No, I don’t want to hear about your product or service right off the bat. No, I’m not always in the mood to talk about my day with someone when I’m already late for my next meeting.”