New InsideView Guide: For Whom the Phone Rings, A Sales Guide to Effective Outbo

[Doha]

A Foreword from the author:

Outbound prospectors are the hunters of the business landscape. Our art requires a particular finesse that takes years to hone. Our targets and our tools constantly shift. The last decade bore witness to great change in the sales industry, and outbound prospecting will never be the same as it was. We face a juncture of the old and the new: the cold call vs. the connected all.

Prospecting is essential to the growth of healthy business. Most of us now know that the cold call is dead, but where do we go from there? Sales managers at Fortune 500 companies still compensate sales reps based on the volumes of their call logs. Companies continue to refuse budget requests for sales data and intelligence solutions. Some sales reps still believe that picking up the phone or writing an email or sending a tweet or requesting a connection on LinkedIn will harvest a fruitful pipeline of opportunity. Best practices for the modern day continue to emerge, but outbound prospecting remains the Wild West of the sales world. Either we can adapt to the changing environment, or our competition will blast us to oblivion.

I began my career in sales some forty or so years ago. I sold telephones, of all things. Back then, I had a print copy of the Wall Street Journal and a list of all the Fortune 1000 executives. I had to wake up before the sunrise every day to scan market patterns for company expansion, and to find out what was happening at my target prospect?s companies. I knew what I was looking for, but never what I would find. Each day was an adventure into the unknown. The Internet changed everything.

The time has come for me to re-write the quintessential outbound playbook with a few addendums in consideration of social media. I hope you find these practices useful and worthwhile.

Download the Guide.

About the author: Mr. Outbound is an InsideView sales consultant with over 40 years experience in technology sales. He?s never met a quota he hasn?t exceeded, and every sales rep he?s ever trained has gone on to found a Fortune 500 company. He builds homes for Haitian refugees in his spare time, and his hobbies include cave diving, extreme sail boating, and large game hunting in the wilds of Africa.