What’s the most effective method for “outbound” sales of SaaS products?
Answer:
Good points from Jonathan, though I would label the calls to the company executives ‘new calls’ instead of ‘cold calls.’ It’s an important mental model to use when approaching the call. This positions you as a peer having a conversation instead of a traditional sales call to action.
With the amount of information available about individuals on LinkedIn, you can know quite a bit about the executive before the call. Also research previous conference participation or speaking spots, papers they’ve published, and quotes from news articles. In fact, executives expect you to know quite a bit about them before calling. If you call and start firing off very basic situation or information requests, they’ll be rather peeved and the call with end with – “Now’s not a good time. Send me an email.”
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I’m both a salesperson and an executive, so from time to time I receive inbound sales calls. When the person starts with something like – “Do you work in the housing market?” or “What type of work do you do in housing?” then we’re done in 10 seconds. Had the person taken five minutes to Google me, the answering is blatantly obvious.
If you need a resource on effective outbound calling, Michael Pedone does a nice job of developing the right approach to these calls in his webinars (www.salesbuzz.com– several free recordings on his site.) One aspect that he drives home is to approach the prospect with specific ideas on their business. You can warm up to this with good research or preselling by developing and sharing content/news articles/blog posts/white papers.
On the email side, I’ve also done the “bomb” approach on email. You need to develop an extremely effective, concise message if you go this route with a specific call to action.
