When considering the typical salesperson, one usually imagines an overworked employees in the corner cubicle of a dimly-lit office floor, slaving away at a call sheet dialing number after number only to receive hang up after hang up. Now telemarketing has its place– I’ve tried my luck in the cold-calling arena in various sales positions I’ve held and have had varying degrees of success. However, one thing is for sure: it’s hard! And it’s only getting harder. Companies these days are trying to put as much distance between the decision making chain and a telemarketing salesperson. More often than not, your case gets lost in limbo. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the “I’ll give this to our CFO and they’ll reach back out if they’re interested.” They never do. I’m guilty of it too. I work in the admissions department of Grove City College and this last week I received a call from a woman who sells illustrated maps of campuses to be used in promotional materials. “I’ll pass this up the food chain and if there is an interest, my boss will give you a call,” I said before jotting her information down on a sticky note. I stuck the yellow paper on my bosses desk and I (and I imagine she too) never heard of it again. This of course is all intentional. If the decision maker had to hear every two-bit sales pitch that got near their desk, they would never have time to actually manage the company. So how do you break through these barriers? You have to be willing to prospect outside the box.
I’ve worked a number of sales positions selling all kinds of concepts, events, ideas, and products. Currently I’m doing consulting work for a publishing company. I work on a roll-out team for a young adult novel entitled “A Country of Their Own.” My role is to set up speaking engagements, book signings, and the like. I had very few contacts and no money to purchase lists of leads. In order to get our program in front of the right people, I had to get creative. First and foremost, from other jobs I’ve done I know that if you can get someone of importance to be the one to present the opportunity to the decision maker instead of just going at it yourself. This is especially effective when you don’t know the organization as well. My first step was to utilize a list of 1300 US mayors of major cities all through the country. Using the mail merge function of Outlook, Excel, Word, and Gmail, I sent an email to each of these offices presenting the opportunity to talk in their city or do a book signing and then asked them to forward this on to their library system, school system, or endowment for the arts. Not all of them did, but the net I cast was so wide, the success rate could afford to be small. Once these schools, libraries, and other institutions got an email from the office of the mayor, they immediately considered the request and we set a meeting. This process turned out over 100 different hot leads, dozens of which developed and 12 have already closed. Not bad for 30 minutes of prospecting work to send the initial requests. I followed this same process on a list of 1700 collegiate admissions emails requesting that they pass the information onto english and creative writing departments. This had less success as an admissions office carries less weight in a collegiate setting than a mayor does in city offices. However it did turn into a dozen or so leads and 4-5 opportunities, including a virtual talk to an American school in Switzerland.
Is this the only way to develop leads outside of the box? Far from it. This is exactly my point. If you do it the way everyone else does– in the way it has always been done, you will get screened, ignored, and stonewalled the majority of the time. Find a way to approach the problem differently. Find a different way to get in front of your target, even if you don’t exactly know who your target is. When you don’t know, find someone who does. Utilizing the technology at hand, this whole process can be streamlined to move the needle a whole lot in very little time.
BoweryJE22