Improve your sales success by preparing your cold call

Proposition selling

Rather often we get a proposition of a web services company for increasing our SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
That’s an interesting proposition as improving the SEO of our website will generate more visitors, which could increase the number of leads, that could become customers.

However when we lookup these companies on Alexa or Compete in order to know the number of visitors of their websites, they rank significantly lower than ours. Not exactly a proof of their competence. 

So maybe we should help them to increase their SEO instead?

Preparation equals success

As a salesman you should normally inform and prepare about your target customer in order to address him with the appropriate solutions to his problems.
This is of course time consuming and seemingly non-productive.

However your CRM system should assist you in this inquiry process that involves mainly retrieving data from many sources on the Internet.
Sources about: the company, the funding, their industry, their business, their products or solutions and the people.

This preparation will increase your chances on success significantly as:
- It can become obvious the target customer is not suited for your solutions: thus stop wasting your time.
- You have more data to qualify the lead.
- You obtain insight in the situation and problems allowing presenting the best solution for them.

Your investigation is half the work for success, saving you even more time in the sales process.

Do you investigate first or do you address whoever?
Does your CRM help you with this Internet Data Mining?