Gone Fishin'

Day 2 - Feb 13, 2012
Second day of blogging and I'm getting ready to take some of the younger sales reps on my team on an adventure in cold calling starting at 0730 tomorrow.  I'm looking forward to it.  I think this is a lost art.

This takes me back to the beginnings of my career.  Two great salesman, Dwayne Nagel (now with Cisco) and Leon Luckey (now running his own business Net54Baseball) taught me most everything I know about cold calling.  Heather Goodnight taught me how to make it an art form.

I'll sum it up for you; Preparation and PERSISTENCE are everything.  From where I sit now the internet has changed the game on the preparation end of things.  Nothing has changed on the persistence end.

The amount of information available on company, social and information websites is crazy.  I can read some of my prospects musings, get to know a bit about him/her, find where their last four jobs were and depending on their social media addiction, where they had breakfast this morning. All that being said, it hasn't gotten any easier.

The proliferation of information has made prospects a little more wary of the random caller trying to get their attention.  Also, I believe you have a little less time to get on their radar.  Here is where a little more preparation is needed and a lot more persistence.

What I've done tonight is find 10 prospects at 6 companies that I am targeting tomorrow.  I've done the usual Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Hoovers, Jigsaw and RainKing searches and have done a pretty good network reconstruction on their org charts.  What I've also done, is listened to or read their CEO's take on the coming quarter/year and have written some notes as to how I can try to work this nugget into the conversation with the prospect. What is your responsibility to _______ (insert CEO's vision here)?  Who knows, I may make a complete ass of myself.

I will continue to target these 10 prospects until they either get sick enough of me to take a meeting or I get a cease and desist letter in the mail (not really but you get the picture).

I'll report back tomorrow on how our little fishing expedition went.

Stay after it and good night.