Why Prospect Research Is Sales Best Practice by lisafugere

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Why Prospect Research Is Sales Best Practice
by lisafugere

Most sales managers expect reps to reach a certain number of phone calls, emails, or tweets every day in their efforts to contact prospects, and some companies reward reps for maintaining a high volume of calls each day. That being said, doing your research is as important as contacting a lead. We?ve put together a few reasons why pre-call research should be a standard sales practice for every rep.

Raise Your Daily Productivity Level
Most sales expertise suggests a seven-touch approach to each lead during the initial contacting and lead qualification phase of the sales cycle. If you have 50 leads, then, you will touch a prospect 350 times via email, phone, and social media. If you have the wrong contact information for 10 of those leads, and another 10 aren?t a good fit, 140 of your communications will be a waste. If you approximate 30 seconds for every sales communication, that?s 70 minutes of wasted time.

Researching your leads can save you 45 of those minutes. If you spend 30 seconds researching each of your 50 leads for basic contact checks and fit analysis, you?ll spend a total of only 25 minutes.

Saving yourself 45 minutes may not seem like a huge amount of time, but when you add it over time, it can make a huge difference.

Accelerate the Sales Cycle
If you don?t take those 25 minutes to do a little research, your communications will likely be shots in the dark. You?re much less likely to convert prospects quickly if you have to waste time discovering basic information about them. All that information is available online and through data and sales intelligence solutions. Take advantage of it, and turn more leads into opportunities.

Prioritize Your Prospects
Caliper Corp reported that 92% of all customer interactions occur on the phone. Phone calls are a lot more difficult to automate than emails and tweets; they require a human communication. Hopefully, your lead funnel operates properly and sales reps always have an excess of leads to call. The higher your lead volume, the greater the importance of pre-call research. Sales reps should be able to take any list of leads and know in ten minutes which are the most likely to buy soon. Without any research, every lead on that list looks the same.

Engage Your Prospects from the First Touch
?We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It?s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.? Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon

Customer service begins the moment you initiate a relationship with a prospect. If you screw up the first call, you may never prepare your company?s image in that prospect?s eye. An irreproachable experience begins with the research you do before you call a prospect.