This is the blog transcript of our video “Get Sales WITHOUT Cold Calling”. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Cold calling sucks. It’s not fun, it’s time consuming, and it’s an inefficient way to try to find business.
The thing is that it’s also one of the more predictable ways to find business.
What if you could develop other predictable ways to find business?
Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
In the past twenty years, I’ve worked in sales and business development for my own businesses and others. I’ve had to cold call on the phone and door to door.
It’s not easy.
And worse, it’s not fun.
But in sales, we keep doing it because we know that we can predict that for every 100 calls that you make, you can most likely set two or three appointments.
And, as we all know, appointments lead to sales. It’s that “simple”, isn’t it?
Personally, though, I’m a big believer that building new business and finding sales can be fun. And it should be!
I mean if we’re going to spend the majority of our day to day doing this, why would you do it in a way that’s so excruciating?
Don’t get me wrong, selling will always be a challenge. Finding the right deal for the right person and guiding it to the finish line is a challenge, and it’s a worthy one. That’s how you’re going to build a business that’s going to put food on the table for yourself and the rest of the people in your company.
But it doesn’t have to be as painful as cold calling is. There are other ways to find leads.
Let’s take a look at a few of my favorites.
First, let’s talk about networking.
If you’ve watched some of my past videos, you know that I’m a big believer that networking is one of the best ways to find leads for your business. There are a lot of great connections that you can make and you’d be surprised how much your business can grow just by getting to know people and making sure that people know who you are.
Networking is great because it has the potential to make two very big impacts on your business.
First, if you network enough, it’s more than likely that you’ll end up coming across plenty of people who need your products or services. While networking events certainly shouldn’t ONLY be used as prospecting opportunities, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention it.
Again, the more people you meet, the more likely you are to find someone who needs to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.
More importantly, though, networking events help you find more potential referral partners. And those people can help you build your network further, introduce you to other referral partners, and, of course, introduce you to clients as well.
Next let’s talk a bit about referrals.
Again, if you’ve seen much of Mission Suite’s content in the past, you know that productive referral relationships are really the holy grail of sales in my book.
It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you have people who are sending you email introductions to prospective clients two or three times a month, selling gets a whole lot easier.
So how do you go about building those referral relationships?
That all comes down to time, intention, and attention.
It takes time to get to know people well enough to build the “know, like, and trust” factor that it takes for them to entrust you with an introduction.
It takes intentionality to make sure they know who they should be introducing you to. Whether that means coming to each meeting prepared with a list of people that you’d like to meet so they can start connecting the dots or just making sure that they know what they should be listening for to make an introduction.
And finally, it takes attention to the relationship to build it to a point where they know you’re not going anywhere. Just meeting someone once doesn’t create a relationship. The relationship takes consistency. And consistency comes from attention.
What is your favorite way to generate leads? Let me know your thoughts down in the comments and while you’re doing that, give this video a like to let us know you’re getting something out of it and help us get more notice in the YouTube rankings!
Next, let’s talk about Referral Mining.
Referral mining is a process I came up with a few years ago when I realized that the work that I was doing on LinkedIn wasn’t really producing results. I would spend hours every week using LinkedIn automation tools trying to expand my network when I realized that the true power of LinkedIn comes down to 2nd connections.
To dive a bit deeper into that, what I mean is that my connections – the people that I know personally and who I already have that trust factor with – are connected to people that I want to meet. As referral partners and as clients.
So why shouldn’t I just ask them for direct introductions to those people?
With LinkedIn, it’s easy to see the connections of the people that you know and make a list of targeted referral asks. You’ll never get introductions to all of the people you ask for, but asking for specific introductions will hugely increase the chances of getting those connections in the first place.
If you want to know more about LinkedIn Referral Mining, we give a webinar on LinkedIn Referral Mining on a regular basis. You can find the link to register for that webinar in the description of this video.
Finally, let’s talk about some automated options for lead generation.
Automated lead generation can be a great option if you have a list of people you know or have agreed to receive emails from you. Keep in mind, all you’re looking for are those people who raise their hand to say that they’re interested in what you’re doing.
If you have a list of people you can send emails to, you can offer some sort of downloadable content – a whitepaper, a checklist, or something else like that – and then reach out to the people who have downloaded it.
It may lead to business opportunities or may just lead to a conversation, but either way you have more people to talk to who can help you build your business.
I know I mentioned this earlier in the video, but we’re giving a webinar all about generating more referrals through LinkedIn and, if you got something out of this video, I think you’ll enjoy it. Check out the link in the description of this video to register!
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!