Prospecting has never been harder – or easier. Sales expert Kendra Lee of the KLA Group recently published an article titled “Cool Sales Tools to Make Prospecting Easier.” She discusses some of the best tools out there to help you with everything – from identifying your best prospects, writing a powerful email and attracting them to you. It’s so packed with great ideas and links that we had to share the best points.
- Identify the who. Once you know the types of contacts and companies you want to approach, use Zoominfo.com, NetProspex.com, Insideview.com or Hoovers.com to search and get the names of the best people to talk to.
- Delve in. Do some research on the contacts you’ve uncovered on those same sites. What have they written? Where have they been quoted? Use this information to craft your grabber value proposition for phone calls and emails.
- Secure contact info. Start with the above sites to find the most current contact information for your target prospects. You can also use LinkedIn, Facebook and other social networks as a tool.
- Find elusive email addresses. If you still can’t find an email address, go to your search engine and type “@their website domain.” It will pull up email addresses for that domain so you can more effectively guess your contact’s email address.
- Observe your prospects. Free services like Google Alerts allow you to see all the tweets and comments they’ve made and where they’re mentioned. You’ll know what to talk about when you call – and more importantly – when they need you to call.
- Make your emails stand out. Use Gobbledygook.grader.com to pick out trite or hype-filled words and phrases you don’t even know you’re using. It’s great for brochures and online copy, too.
- Know if they’re listening. ReadNotify.com traces email opens and forwards, numbers of times read, and URL clicks, so you can know if your prospects are reading what you send. Use bit.ly to shorten long links for social network comments and emails. You can track how many times the links are opened, forwarded and by whom.
- Increase your own productivity. If you’re a Microsoft Outlook user, Xobni.com is a plug-in that makes searching your inbox and finding information about your contacts fast and easy. You can even search social networks for information about your contacts.
We are very appreciative that Kendra Lee published these tips. Prospecting is an essential part of sales and one of the skills critical to success in today’s market. The tools Kendra outlines and explains give you new levels of information and insight to increase your odds of attracting the attention of your top contacts and getting a reply.
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