Is Your Sales Team Supporting How Your Clients Buy Today?

What are your teams doing today to help support their database? Is your sales teams still cold-calling and sending email blasts? Is your marketing team attending useless conventions?

Does your customer service team dodge client support calls? Are you even segmenting leads? 

Learn which practices your teams should be adopting and disowning to help support your database today.

Warm Calls vs. Cold Calls

Think of the quote attributed to Albert Einstein, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

If you have not seen the handwriting on the wall with cold-calling, ask anyone with an Android smartphone that has recently updated their version of Android OS. When they receive a call from a known spammer, their entire screen turns red to warn them. Smartphones are at the point where you no longer need to call back a number to know they are a spammer thanks to Google and caller ID.

If you do not have a relationship with the person you are cold calling, you are automatically in the penalty box. Fewer and fewer people even have phones on their desks anymore and virtually every phone these days has caller ID, so if you are doing cold calls and leaving cold voicemails, you are likely getting nowhere and even jeopardizing future opportunities.

Consider:

• Warm calls vs. cold calls
• Helping vs. interrupting

It is a whole different ball game when someone has downloaded one of your white papers; you call to make sure it downloaded correctly, and determine if there is anything else you can help them with because they will recognize your company. It is a whole different ball game when someone has attended one of your webinars; you call to make sure they were able to log in to the webinar okay, and answer all their questions.

Not everyone is going to take your phone call, but the overwhelming majority of the people you contact will recognize who you are and why you are calling. It turns the tables around from being perceived as a sales professional to being perceived more as a subject matter expert.

Email Blasts

It is very painful to see that some people are still resorting to email blasts.

Email blasts sometimes happen when someone is under the impression that because someone connected with them on LinkedIn, they can then import their entire address book from LinkedIn into their email service provider or marketing automation software.

I’m here to tell you, blasting someone repeatedly with newsletters, emails, and lead nurturing who has not explicitly converted on your website or landing page for a piece of educational content is spam; it does not matter how you slice it, spam is in the eye of the beholder. You are crossing a line when you email someone repeatedly in an impersonal way.

People are fighting back against spam, and it is getting harder to get real estate in someone’s inbox--even when you are doing it in the right context and have a personal relationship with them.

Instead of spamming people, you should be thinking long and hard about targeted permission-based email that adds value as opposed to interrupting and harassing people. Take the approach of trying to help rather than harass.

Trade Shows

Trade shows are not going anywhere because they possess reasonably healthy business models and have continued to evolve. If your business is attending trade shows to meet new prospects and gain new leads, think about the typical reasons why most people go to conferences and trade shows.

First, it is usually all about the education:

• How to keep skills sharp
• What is new in the industry
• How they can better themselves, their team, and their company

Second--after education--is networking with peers.

The third reason--and time permitting--is visiting exhibitors on the conference floor to see about some of the new wares. It is usually not at the top of the priority list, but it is typically something people will make time for to a certain degree.

Let’s face it, in today’s modern buyer’s journey, there is an excellent chance someone is wandering the trade show floor while on their phone. Before they decide to stop at your booth, they are looking at your homepage, LinkedIn company page, or your Twitter feed, and making snap judgments about how or whether they will engage.

It is important to be realistic about what needs to be done before, during, and after regarding capturing and segmenting leads and make preparations to be perceived as an educational authority.

How strong is your company’s outreach strategy? Are you leaving a memorable impression or is your approach deemed insignificant by leads? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments below.

To learn more about using effective outreach strategies to connect and support your database, watch our webinar recording on "How to Use LinkedIn Social Selling to Attract Great Clients and Grow Revenue."