A sales team is often referred to as the “front line” of a company, but I don’t think that quite does the role justice. Sales teams aren’t just the first point of contact for your company, they’re also the explorers of the organization, doing research, digging deeper, and continually exploring new territory. The best sales reps are proactive in discovering new accounts and uncovering new information about the accounts they already have.
And the best get even better when they think outside the box during the prospecting process. In most industries, you’re competing with dozens of other companies and hundreds of other sales reps for every customer. In this competitive environment, information is a serious advantage and the sales rep that’s willing to dig a little deeper or look where nobody else has thought to just might win the deal at the end of the day.
That’s why we invited Alex Zimmerman to this edition of Sales Tips to share three of his favorite creative prospecting techniques.
Transcript
Hey everyone. Alex here with Salesloft. Today I’m going to talk about three ways to get creative with your prospecting.
The first thing I like to use is TweetDeck. The way I have it configured is I have all of my company’s top competitors lined up on the feeds so I can see exactly what’s going on with my target industry and basically my target customers. A lot of people move to social these days to complain about service or support that they’re having with their vendor. So this allows me to see exactly who’s complaining about what vendor so when I reach out to them, that cold reach out is more so a warm reach out.
Another way I like to get creative with my prospecting is using job boards online. For example, I use Indeed and within Indeed you can do keyword searches so I’m able to put in our top competitors and with that, I can find job details mentioning their wholesale stack so going in it’s not so I’m going in blindly. I know exactly kind of there’s a need within that target audience.
The last way I like to get creative is using our current customer base. With knowledge of our best and top accounts, I’m able to use LinkedIn, run a search, find kind of those leaders at the companies. What I do is I scroll down through the recommendations. Within the recommendations, you can find colleagues of theirs, former or present, that have praised them in the past. This is a great entryway to finding new target accounts and kinda making that cold email or cold phone call a lot warmer.
Thank you so much for listening to these tips on prospecting. I hope they help. If you have any comments or advice, feel free to drop it below. I hope you have a great rest of your day.