This is a guest post from Kyle Porter, Founder at SalesLoft. SalesLoft is a Boulder Techstars company. They are creating a killer sales tool for sales people. Their goal, provide sales people with timely, actionable information, that will get them closer to the sale.
Kyle offers some great sales advice in this post, enjoy!
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A year out of school, I was running a division of a professional services company. I sold software development to regional tech companies. Our buyer was busy...& they had a lot of "recruiter-type" sales reps calling them asking for stuff.
It was a crowded sales landscape...I had to learn to break through the clutter.
It's worse today. Buyers are busier than ever & they won't let you waste their time. In order to connect, build relationships & get a shot at solving buyers issues, you have to do more. I call "doing more", selling with sincerity. In my opinion it's the best way to sell.
Sincere sellers:
- Don't ask questions which they should already know the answers. They ask the follow-ups
- Only sell to those whom they genuinely think they've got a good shot at helping
- Find out about their buyer's company (history, milestones, agendas & mission)
- Find a way to make their buyer smile.
Back at eHire, we did these things and about 9 months into my gig there, I found a really cool trick. Here's an example of stacking your cards in the favor of sincerity.
The landscape: We sold software services. It was best to sell those services to people who needed them.
The problem: The buyer was busy and it was hard to break through the noise
The solution: Built a web scraper that would go to the top 80 prospect sites & monitor any new job postings. Whenever they'd add new ones, it would automatically email me with the results.
The result: I knew every-time one of my top 80 prospects was looking for software resources, I'd call them immediately with the solution and convert more leads to closed deals than by any other prospecting method.
It was an "out-of-the-box" way to get an edge & make the engagement much more sincere.
Think about it...what can you do to come to your buyer with more sincerity?