Sean

Brilliant article! I started out as a outside sales rep for a school and used a similar technique of getting current students to referred me to their supervisors and training managers. For some reason it never occurred to me to call end users in the companies I had no “in” with though. Fortunately I had hundreds of students to work with so I was never short of people to call on, but this simple technique could have netted me an extra 10K a year!

As always Paul, you were thought provoking and insightful!

-Brad

Certainly you can look at it as making ‘safe’ cold calls in order to generate a warm referral. I don’t exactly see it that way. I see it as doing my research prior to calling my executive target. These are cold calls to the salespeople but they aren’t selling calls (with the exception of gaining their endorsement when calling the proposed decision maker). They are primarily reconnaissance calls.

Regarding your second point, you’re exactly right that this eliminates some of the most basic information gathering that I would otherwise have to engage the decision maker’s time with. I do, however, review the information I’ve gathered with the decision maker to get his or her opinion. I don’t do this by asking them to agree or disagree with their employees. Rather I ask information gathering questions about the points that the salespeople have brought up. That keeps the decision maker from having to agree or disagree with his or her team members and gives them the freedom to answer based on their own perceptions.

If their statements differ from their team members, I’ll ask a little more pointed question to clarify. It does, however, cut down on the information gathering time with the executive and helps me construct my questions prior to calling. Needless to say, I often have to change my questions based on the executives opinions, but at least I have a good place to start when I call and I still have the referrals with which to gain their attention.

Another interesting point is that this is very much counter to traditional wisdom which says to always go straight for the most senior executive/decision-maker for your product. The problem with that strategy is that your first call to a company (even a warm referral) is the time at which you know the least about them and their needs. So if you target the most senior executive first, then often you’re doing your basic information gathering on the senior executive’s time. It may well be far better to do this with more junior people so you are much better briefed before engaging the senior executive. Your strategy does just this.

Ian

Cold calling prospects is one of the biggest time wasters salespeople engage in. But there are still prospects you can’t reach by any other means than the phone. Here is a process that turns what would be a cold call into a referral call….

You’re right in the sense that I did reveal one of my strategies and any of my competitors can take it and use it. And on the surface it may not look like a wise move to have used my method of getting sales training and consulting business when I could have used an example from another industry and not revealed so much about my particular application.

However, what would sever me the most would be for every sales training company to adopt this process because then my question to the prospect would be why would they want to hire a company that I had to teach how to prospect when they can hire the sales trainer’s sales trainer.

Anyway, I appreciate your point but I don’t feel a threat in revealing my methods as there really aren’t any great secrets in selling and prospecting–just methods that work–and others that don’t. This one works.

I find this a bit of a strange article. I mean I think the content is great. But aren’t you telling all of your competition who sells sales training and consulting exactly how you go about getting your business? Is that a wise move? What if they start doing exactly what you’re doing? How will you then be any different than anyone else?

Thanks for the great strategy, but I have to wonder about whether it was a wise move for you.

In my instance I speak with the sales team. If I were selling copiers, I would look to speak to the end users of the equipment and possibly someone associated with keeping the sucker running. If I were selling parking lot maintenance, I’d speak with anyone who parks in the lot. The idea is to simply get information about how the company currently uses my product or service (or doesn’t), the end user’s personal opinion of the company’s current situation and vendor, and any other relevant information–then I go for the referral.

Yes, you’re right, it works great. No cold shoulders. No unreturned voice mail. No quick “not interested.”