We all hate it, but prospecting is the single most important part of selling in 2010. With all of this technology surrounding us, we should at least be able to take out some of the drudgery. As a social salesperson, here are a few questions that come to my mind when I prospect:
- Is this person the decision maker?
- Does this person have a pain that my product solves?
- If not, does their superior or company have some pain that my product solves?
- Will they / can they refer me to the decision maker?
All of these questions can be answered with a few simple searches through the inter-webs. Let’s look at some free resources that are out there.
If you aren’t searching LinkedIn for your prospects, you need to get out of the stone age. You can get title, position, company and sometimes an email address if they so choose to share. The secret here is to continuously expand your LinkedIn network to get access to a broad range of people. If you aren’t in the prospect’s network, there are other options…
Super Ninja Tip: LinkedIn will hide contacts that are beyond the third degree in most cases. If you are NOT logged in, you can get different results. In addition, if you ARE logged in and search as if you are NOT logged in, you will get yet another set of results. Try this URL on for size:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=bob&last=smith
Just replace “Bob” and “Smith” with you prospects first and last. We’ll dive into parameterized queries in another post.
Yet another ubiquitous social network, Facebook can give you an edge on any public information that might help you close faster. With all the gaps in the privacy on Facebook, a lot of people are hiding their personal information. I don’t blame them. Here is a URL for you to use to search Facebook quickly.
http://www.facebook.com/search/?q=bob+smith&init=quick
You will need to log in to get these results, but you will find many (round 25%, in my case) fully share their college networks and work networks with the public. This helps to strike up a conversation around sports, hometowns and more.
Plain Old Google
The BEST place to search for your prospects is Google. In the past year, Google has gone on a rampage indexing content all over the net. In fact, one of the purposes of Google Caffeine is looking to index the web continuously. That’s great for us, as we can now get introspection into what Google can see that we cannot. Just remember this handy search term:
site:corporatewebsite.com “Bob Smith”
If you put this into the search, you can search within the company website to pull any pertinent information about Bob Smith. Corporate profiles, PPTs and press releases are all there. And now you have a talking point.
As part of the Social Sales Tool, I hope to bring all these types of searches together into a web console you can use to prospect better. Have any tips? Leave them in the comments!
tagged: Social Sales
