In one of our most recent posts, Sarah stated that we simply have too many tools & information at our disposal to be making cold calls (5 Ways to Never Make Another Cold Call). She couldn’t be any more correct. The days are long gone of just purchasing a list & grinding through prospects in hopes of finding a needle in a haystack. As an Account Growth Specialist myself, here are three tools I use every day to make my life easier & enhance my approach.
LinkedIn X-Ray Tool
You don’t necessarily need to pay up for Sales Navigator to utilize LinkedIn as a selling tool. The bells and whistles can be nice, but there are free tools out there to help with your prospecting. Recruitment Geek offers an x-ray search that allows you to bypass LinkedIn’s native barriers to find people within your target market.
I worked on a project awhile back for a non-profit where we were looking to invite call center executives out to their annual convention with complimentary registration. Easy pitch, right? The hard part is figuring out where to start. With this tool, I was able to experiment with a variety of different keywords to find the right people I needed to fill the seats at the convention.
An example search would be <Job Title> <Location> or “Call Center Director Cleveland Ohio”. I instantly had access to the names I needed to begin my search. Not to mention, it creates the perfect transition, “Hello my name is _____ & I’m represented by _____. I stumbled across your profile on LinkedIn & wanted to invite you to our convention with a complimentary registration…..”
Email Format
If you’ve done any sort of inside sales work, I guarantee these scenarios have happened to you at least once. You spoke with an interested prospect & acquired an email address. Heck, you even read it back to them. When the email was sent, it bounced back to sender. Maybe there is a prospect who would be a perfect fit for what you do but can’t seem to get past their voicemail. You left a couple messages, but who knows if they even check them in the first place? If you only had their email address, then maybe you could touch base.
With websites such as Email Format & Hunter, all you need to know is the domain of the company to identify what format of email they’re using on their server. The only thing you need to know is your prospects first & last name. I wouldn’t recommend going over the top & spamming your prospects with cold emails, but if utilized correctly it can be a great compliment to your current inside sales strategy.
YouTube
What?! YouTube? How could that possibly make your inside sales strategy more effective? Look, I guarantee the person you’re calling has been cold called before. In order to set yourself apart from the competition attention to detail is important. For the love of all that is holy, make sure you’re pronouncing your prospects name correctly. Not only will butchering a name raise red flags with the gatekeeper, but there is no better way to build instant rapport with the potential customer than to nail the pronunciation when they’re used to it being butchered.
This is where the best search engine in the world comes into play. YouTube has a plethora of videos out there for almost any name combination you can think of that will use audio to read it back to you. It takes 30 seconds to type “<name> pronunciation>” & watch a 15 second video.