There is a big discrepancy in the field of sales in using cold calling to reach senior executives. I believe the controversy arrives in that a senior executive will not answer the phone. This trend is growing to the point where certain companies as Coca-Cola have actually eliminated voicemail in the business altogether, preventing Sales people from calling and interrupting executives at work. So the point is why then why would I want to cold call to senior executives in my named account list, within my geography?
The reason that it is an effective way to prospect, is it is actually a free commercial. A free commercial in the respect that the senior executive will listen to it and it is intuitive and to give you 8 to 10 seconds before they hang up the call.
So now we’ve determined that it’s worth leaving a message the real challenge is what do you say (free “gifts of Knowledge”)? To leaver a descriptive message about our product? Leave a vendor scripted message about our service and how it can help them? Do we leave a message and ask questions about what they may consider important in their business? What are their critical KPIs?
The answer is leaving a message that is highly financial, value latent, and tied to a strategic initiative and they’re being measured on, where they are acutely aware of.
Example of this would be trying to sell a billion-dollar company which is still considered a upper SMB company, and learning that they are cutting their IT spend for 2015. It is a large initiative because they just finished a merger and acquisition and they need to be able to put money back in the company, so expense curtailment is a big project. You also found out through research, and chatting with some of the IT guys you know that the company is cutting back on server-based expansion and going with cloud. In the cloud, is less money and higher performance, which is a great way to lower expenses.
I would also try to look at the company’s financials. In the case of this one billion-dollar company, they may not be public but still have shareholder reports, analyst’s write-ups, and articles about their finances. Also CEO letters to the shareholders.I also look at IT trade magazines as to what they’re buying and what they’re not for some insight as to what they may be eliminating to cut their costs. So it really a matter of about a day you can figure out was support the executive how is measuring this how he’s getting measured perhaps a timeframe for this and how your solution might bring value specifically to what they’re doing.
Getting that time in to a three sentence message is another story, and we will be having blogs on that following these is a great learning exercise.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.