Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling (Jeb Blount)

by Jeb Blount

There are five steps to planning for effective IPPs: Research. With planned IPPs, do your research in advance to get decision-maker name(s), learn about the history of their business, visit their website, look for recent press releases, and review your CRM for notes and other insights. For T-Calls, grab your smartphone and do a quick scan of their website and social media sites to pick up any information that may help you ask better questions and refine your approach. Personalize your approach. Personalize your approach to make it unique to each prospect. Develop relevant questions about their business, compliment them on recent accomplishments, or offer insights you have that may help them solve a particular problem. It is also a good idea to leverage the relationships you have with nearby customers to gain instant credibility: “We've been doing business with Billy next door for five years and he loves our service.” Develop an objective for every call. Before you walk into your prospect's door, make sure you have clearly defined what you want to accomplish. Be prepared to close. Be ready! Make sure you have everything you need to close the deal with you—sale sheets, order forms, contracts, presentation material, and so on. Log calls, notes, and set follow-up tasks in your CRM. It does you absolutely no good to go on IPPs and gather information if you don't log the information in your CRM and set follow-up tasks for additional research and callbacks. Take the time to log e...