What do you check? Company linkedin, company website? Personal linkedin? Recent company news?
What else? How much time do you usually spend preparing for a sales meeting?
CEO
What do you check? Company linkedin, company website? Personal linkedin? Recent company news?
What else? How much time do you usually spend preparing for a sales meeting?
- Research the human: Sales is deeply personal. You should honor that by doing comprehensive research on your prospect(s). Look up their LNKD work history sure, but then find their twitter. Read any news article they are quoted in. Find out about where they live, what hobbies they have, etc. (As an aside: DO NOT mention you did this. DO NOT say "Oh I saw you have 3 kids that play soccer in Austin!" cuz that's hella creepy. But if you do know that about them, perhaps mention that you love BBQ in your warmup. Mention that you are a soccer fan during the pitch. Talk about raising kids at some point. You want THEM to say "Oh I love BBQ! I have 3 kids who play soccer!" etc. Let THEM find the connection. Then you can be "surprised" and say "Oh wow I had no idea! Tell me more...") #sales Nothing sells faster than "serendipity", so make sure to manufacture some.
- Research the company: You should be able to ACTUALLY describe what the company does. Not just say "cloud-based data mining blah blah" whatever jargon they use. You should know their product. Their strengths. Weaknesses. Competitors. Read their reviews on G2, Yelp, etc. Look up their funding history. Recent press releases. Etc. You should have all this info readily available. (But again, DO NOT use it. Do not say "Oh I already did all this research on your company." Just have the knowledge available so when you are having a convo, you sound educated on the space.)
- Prepare the Top 3 Hits: Before every call, I list out my top 3 hits. These are the top 3 things I MUST say on this call. Every call should have a unique top 3, so it's not just your best 3 value props. That's dumb. As an example, if you are selling a CRM tool to a company that's scaling their sales team for the first time, your top 3 could be:
1. Lightweight - We're easy to implement and deploy, so you don't need a heavy sales ops / engineering lift to get started.
2. Customizable - New sales teams change processes a lot. We're a flexible solution so we can keep up with your changing strategy.
3. Benchmarking - We can offer support on how your sales team is performing vs. others that are a similar size. This gives you some data to help inform how well you are doing as you scale up the team.