Salespeople: Know Your Customer Before You Call

Inside sales training expert Steve Richard offers advice on how to avoid one of the cardinal sins of outbound prospecting: going in unprepared.

The vast majority of outbound prospectors make an unforgiveable mistake when they call a prospect: they start talking before they’ve earned the right to.
The process usually follows a similar pattern, says Steve Richard, co-founder and Chief Content Officer of sales training and consulting company Vorsight. Lead generators pick up the phone, dial the prospect, and lead with their pitch. Then they dive right into rapidly spewing competitive advantages, or a monologue defining exactly why their company’s product should matter to the prospect.
Typically, Richard says, those calls end with a common refrain. “Yeah, thanks. We’re not interested.” Click.
In a recent conversation with OpenView, Richard explained that lead generators must prove they deserve to have a conversation with their prospects before launching into their pitch. They can do that by conducting some relatively basic — and quick — pre-call research.
By studying a business for a few minutes before a call, Richard says lead generators can uncover critical pieces of information that give them a stronger chance of catching their prospects’ attention, such as:

• Reading about new product launches
• Looking for strategic planning announcements
• Performing a Google News search on the business to find information about company news or awards
• Combing through LinkedIn Groups to find points of commonality (i.e. shared friends, colleagues, groups, etc.)

“Honestly, pre-call research is really about discovering the ‘why,’” Richard explains. “Why are you calling, why should the prospect care about you, and why is what you’re about to tell them truly valuable to their business, rather than just any other business.
“A prospecting call is not a monologue. It’s a two-way exchange. And in order to engage in that dialogue, you need to knock down the walls that most prospects keep up.”

Time is Money

It’s important to note, however, that pre-call research shouldn’t be a time drain. Richard suggests implementing a 3×3 pre-call research structure that encourages reps to uncover three key pieces of information in three minutes or less.
After all, time is of the essence in sales, and if lead generators are spending 20 minutes or more studying each prospect they plan to call, it will prevent them from making the volume of calls that are necessary for lead generation success.
The idea is to quickly uncover the kind of information about prospects or their companies that will show that you’ve done more than simply look up their name and number in a directory.
“Lead generators don’t need to know absolutely everything about the business,” Richard says. “Just enough to show that they’ve made an effort to learn about the prospect.”

Proof is in the Pudding

Richard’s 3×3 research framework isn’t simply sales theory, either.
Richard recalls a friend at another company deciding to test the core tenets of 3×3 research while he was building an outbound prospecting team. The company formed two teams of lead generators and gave lists of 1,000 relatively similar prospects to each of them. Team A executed a typical lead generation approach (picking up the phone and dialing without any additional research). Team B made the same number of phone calls, but its list was comprised of prospects that shared a common LinkedIn group with the company.
The results? Team B’s list ultimately yielded 70 percent more appointments. Vorsight and its clients, Richard says, have experienced similar success.
“That’s real proof of the value of pre-call research,” Richard says. “It might seem like being members of the same LinkedIn group is horribly generic, but it could be the touchpoint that encourages a prospect to put down their guard and listen.”

Strive for Efficiency

Along with limiting pre-call research to three minutes (five minutes at the absolute most), Richard says companies should also encourage lead generation reps to do two other things to improve efficiency:

• Tap into their CRM before conducting research to see if the information they need is already there
• Input their research in the CRM after a call to ensure that they don’t have to conduct the same research again before their next call

“The 3×3 concept is less about the three points that you discover about a prospect,” Richard explains. “It’s more about speed and efficiency of your research, and the fact that you’re conducting research at all.”