I didn't see any sales books. Are there any good sales books? Especially on details like how to generate leads? Every sales book is like "go into the office during your key hours for selling and start making calls, then when you're talking to a prospect do x,y,z". Yeah, great, where do I get this list of prospects to call? Some books have said to look at publicly available personnel lists for places you want to sell to and then start cold calling, determine who the decision maker is for the organization from there, and then get to that person. Really? Maybe, I guess. Others wave this away by saying some other person will generate qualified leads through advertising or something. OK, what if I don't have some other guy to do that? How do I do that? Any books that make this a little less magical?
Doesnt have to be magical. Assuming for enterprise or B2B sales:
Determine who your target customers are by industry/sector ie who is your product for.
Determine who are the top 1000 companies / orgs in that sector (Linked in/ NAIC codes, SIC codes).
If you have a budget you can buy lead lists from SIC, of you dont have, plan for about 2 man weeks to put together a good starter list of companies and prospective contacts.
Once you have your list of companies - id who your prospective user is by role. e.g. who will use your product? What is a likely job title / role?
Use linkedin to find folks in that role or with that Job title?
work out your value propositiion for your product. Boil it down to 2/ 3 lines.
With a short subset of your initial prospect list.
Either cold call / email / linkedin message your targets with your value prop and work out from there:
- which contact method works (e.g. email / phone / linkedin)
- who the buyer is - does your user have purchase power - great you know who to sell to.
- What is their pricing sensitivity?
- IF they dont have purchase power who does -either ask (best) or assume next person in the chain - who do they report to. again identify role/ title and try them.
As you do this your looking to learn how to contact your prospect; who will use your product? Who will buy your product? What is the purchase process? What is the price point?
Based on your learning and each iteration of testing your sales hypothesis– refine your target prospect role/title, refine your value prop, your sales point, your sales process (to match their purchase process e.g. is it simply they buy with credit card from your website or does it go through an enterprise buyer… )
Now go back to your full company list and iterate through using linkedin and search engine to find folks who match your target role / prospect and enter these into your prospect list.
You now have a starting sales list. Contact them, qualify and try to make sales.
I've figured out about 50% of the stuff in this post already (hard won), but if anyone's starting out this content pretty much sums up the majority of B2B and B2E sales steps.
I'd add that with some of the higher value sells send them content or news articles which might be useful to them as an ice breaker. Establishing a genuine rapport is always a nice plus, especially if it shows that you understand their pain points.
Also if you have a prospect in mind ping them about something they've posted then wait a week or two before you pitch them with your proposition. Helps make it feel less like a one way transaction.
How I raised myself from failure to success by Frank Bettger. In my opinion this is a Great Book. It’s also recommended by Tyler Bosmney, founder of Clever.
