“Winging It” Yields Poor Results

The recent CCS® Index showed that 53% of sellers are guilty of “winging” sales calls. Most everyone had been guilty of not doing their due diligence before going to make a sales call.

Activities that should be done as part of pre-call planning would be:

• Visit to the prospect’s website to get a sense for what type of company it is.
• If calling on an executive, check his or her bio on the website to understand their background and areas of responsibility.
• Check social media channels to learn more about the buyer.

When calling on a prospect for the first time, I believe a seller can set themselves apart by having done some research as I believe the person appreciates that effort being made.

Winging Sales Calls Yields Poor Results

What I’ve described above is almost expected of a salesperson and doesn’t require a great deal of time or effort.

A more experienced salesperson would be looking for triggering events on a prospect’s website, so they could make some intelligent decisions about business challenges buyers may fact that the seller’s offering can address.

For example, if you were selling a CRM offering and saw that a prospect had just acquired one of their competitors, you may want to lead with a Success Story about having to merge milestones and seller pipelines to be able to forecast more accurately post-acquisition.

As you would expect, triggering events are likely to have different implications to various Key Players within an organization.

A seller’s ability to personalize the potential issues to specific titles they call on can go a long way toward:

• Establishing credibility early on
• Having buyers conclude you are competent
• Having a buyer share a goal, problem or need that your offering can help them achieve of address

Anyone that has been selling for a while has had occasions where they have “winged it.” I hope you agree:

[clickandtweet handle=”@PrimaryIntel” hashtag=”#SalesTips” related=”@Official_CCS” layout=”” position=””]Key Players you’re calling on can tell when sellers are winging it and that will reduce the chances of good outcomes of sales calls.[/clickandtweet]