Our previous blog post gave you an example of what an effective inbound sales pitch looks like. As discussed, the main goal of this pitch is to flip the table from the old school pitch that was designed to drive value, and make the entire conversation about your prospect, as a person, and how you can help them. In order to do this, you need to take the right steps prior to the call and make sure you are doing your research. An inbound sales pitch starts well before you actually pick up the telephone, and it leverages all the information on the internet. Think about it – when you, or a customer, is going to purchase something, you, or the customer, typically go online and research the product. This is the same concept. You should do as much research about your prospect as possible so you can have an effective, informative conversation. It’s not creepy, it’s strategic!

Following these steps will turn your cold calls, into warm calls.

Step One: Determine the correct customer profile to target.

In order to find the right people to prospect you need to determine what industries and company types you’re going to be targeting. This can be an extremely helpful exercise for every company and sales rep. Start by going through your current book of business and breaking it into a few different buckets, all of which have their own specific characteristics. Example being industry. If a decent amount of your business comes from companies that work in the medical field, make that a bucket. You can then dive into the sales of those companies. Example being companies that are doing in between 10 million and 20 million in revenue. Doing this will give you line of sight into who your product or services is currently providing value too and then you can further target those profile’s for deeper penetration. Once you’ve created a few different customer profiles, you can move onto step two.

Step Two: Research the companies.

Now that you have a few different profiles you can dive into, start finding prospective companies that fit those profiles. Once you’ve found the companies you’re going to be reaching out too, you can start researching the actual company to find information you can integrate into your pitch. A great place to start is to go on the company website, and see if they have a public relations section. If they do, you can read recent articles about their involvement with the community. The trick is to get as detailed as possible. “Hello mr. prospect. I saw you and your team recently launched your new product to the market last Tuesday at the local bank. How has the market responded to the product so far?” If they don’t have a public relations part to the website, see if they have a blog. “Hello mr. prospect. I was reading your blog about your new product release to the public. I thought the section regarding the development of the product was extremely interesting. How’s the market responding to the product so far?” Doing this research arms you with information you can reference that is business specific. Now lets move onto step three and talk about building a connection with the person you’re calling, before you even call them.

Step Three: Research the prospects.

Now that you know the companies you want to start targeting, it’s time to find the actual people that you’re going to be reaching out too, and determine what you’re going to be saying to them. Through the analysis done in step one you have determined what positions you want to target – C level executives, sales directors, heads of marketing – so no you can take a look through the company’s LinkedIn page and find the people that work there that you want to call. Once you find the prospects, drill into their LinkedIn page and learn specific things about them. How long have they been working at the company? Where did they go to school? What are some of their personal interests? This gives you the ability to have a real life, human conversation with them, as opposed to a memorized, canned pitch.

Following these three steps you now will know what companies you are currently providing value too, thus giving you some guidelines about what companies to target. You know detailed information about the those companies and about the people you’ll be speaking to when you prospect them. Lastly, you now know enough to have a personal conversation that people enjoy having. Your potential prospects won’t feel like they’re be sold too, but that they’re having a conversation that could lead to value.