Tech Tools for Improving Sales

Business buyers’ behavior has changed radically over the last several years. One big change has largely been driven by technology, specifically the Internet. Google fundamentally changed the buyer-seller relationship.

In the post-Google world, buyers can type in the name of any product or service and will receive dozens of web pages, white papers, and webinars that will educate them on that area. Prior to Google, buyers met with salespeople to get this information.

The situation is getting worse for salespeople almost daily. Buyers meet each other on social networking sites and compare notes on your products and services without you ever knowing it.

However, technology is also working for salespeople. The most effective sales techniques have been around for a long time; it’s the tools that have radically changed. The three enduring techniques that determine if you will get into a buyer’s office are:

• Calling the right people
• Calling when people need help
• Getting a referral

And there are several online tools that salespeople can implement to do more targeted, effective sales calls.

Call the Right People

The first factor in determining whether you get into the buyer’s office is whether you are actually approaching the right person. When thinking about the people you can speak to in a company, think broadly not narrowly.

If you sell an IT product, for example, don’t just write down that you need to call the chief information officer. Think of all the other people who get involved in purchasing your technology: all the users of your technology, all the other IT people, all the people in operations, and so on.

A great statistic from Marketing Sherpa is that for a technology product of over $25,000 in value, selling to a prospect company with over 1,000 employees, there are 21 people involved in buying that product. So you’ve got a bunch of people to try for that first real conversation.

After you have assembled a prospect profile for the companies and people you want to target, start playing with social media tools to refine your sales process. Jigsaw (jigsaw.com) is my go-to tool for turning my prospect profile into a list of actual prospect companies and people within those companies. The site is a comprehensive online database of up-to-date, downloadable contact information for millions of businesses, and was purchased by Salesforce.com a few months ago. Jigsaw provides contacts’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and emails.

What’s particularly useful about Jigsaw is that the data in there is from other salespeople and business owners. The outcome of this Wikipedia style “crowdsourcing” is that it’s much easier to find mid-level managers in there that you don’t find in more traditional databases like Hoover’s. This can be a huge time saver when your product or service appeals to a certain area of a big (or even mid-sized) company. Crowdsourced data also tends to be cleaner because there are so many people updating it.

Here is one example of how we improved sales results using Jigsaw: I used to run an outsourced telesales group for technology companies. I was amazed when my CRM system reported that some of our inside salespeople had called the chief information officer of a midsized services firm 20 to 30 times without ever getting through. It was commendable how well they stuck to their task, but they never once called anyone else in that company—end result, no progress with that account. When we thought through our approach, we realized we did not need to “paint ourselves into a corner” by just calling the CIO. We were able to come up with a list of seven to eight people in that company that we could call for the first conversation. We wrote down the titles of those seven to eight people, and fed those titles into Jigsaw. Within 10 minutes, we had their direct phone numbers and emails. We called those people and spoke to two of them who gave us vital information on that company.

Get a Referral

Social networks are great tools for creating a “social graph;” in other words, seeing who knows who. Social graph, a term coined by Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Facebook, is a conceptual diagram where lines show a relationship between two people.

In sales, it’s critical to know what “relationship lines” exist that you can follow to get you into an account. Using introductions has been common in sales for a long time—it’s called referral selling. But now there are new tools that allow you to see who your friends know on a whole new scale—and that changes the sales game dramatically.

LinkedIn is the best social network for selling business-to-business. If you build yourself a decent network of people who really know you, and you maintain this network, LinkedIn will get you referrals into your target accounts more times than you imagine (you know it really is a small world).

There are some habits you need to get into when using LinkediIn to make this referral method work. One of them is to not connect to anyone and everyone. Only connect to people you know or people you are committed to getting to know and maintaining a relationship with. Why? Because when it’s time to get the referrals, you need a real human in the middle who actually knows you to make the referral. If the person who comes up as your first degree connection is someone you don’t really know, they are not going to help you. So if you have hundreds of first degree connections and only half of them are people you really know, you will waste a lot of time and make your work seriously inefficient by constantly pulling connections that are not real and will not get you anywhere.