Prospecting

Before we can close a deal, we need to get people into the top of the sales funnel so we can work our sales process! In this section we'll take a look at some of the common prospecting opportunities you will find yourself in, and some strategies to make the best use of your prospecting time and ultimately get qualified people into the top of your funnel.

Video Transcript

" It's time to put some leads into the top of the funnel, let's talk about trade shows in events, it's a great way to generate leads, great way to start getting some conversation as well as getting yourself out in the community and your brand awareness. But we want to make sure that we are successful with events and every dollar we spend on the marketing side, we receive an ROI out in the sell side, right, make this thing a win win. So couple things, I want us to make sure that we focus before heading up to the event, countless sales that we need to do some preparation, we need to research the event ahead of time, look at the event flow, grab the event agendas, find out when they're gonna have breaks, when the booth time when the show floor time is do they have after hours events. And a lot of times you can grab a pre registration list from the show coordinator, that's a great opportunity for you to go through and see who's going to be there any prospects that we know we want to make sure we have a conversation with or in current clients that we know we're going to be there that we can help us maybe spend some time around at the at the show floor at the booth talking to some prospects for us, again, take a look at who's going to be there ahead of time. Now, you also need to understand the vertical markets that this event is catering to maybe it's a vertical specific market, maybe there's going to be multiple different verticals. Okay, but you have to be prepared, understanding the top two line of business applications for each of these verticals, what the most recent version of these applications are, we want to understand how these verticals make money, how they lose money, potential issues, that that these types of companies or verticals have any peak seasons, we need to worry about government regulations, there's tons of information, but the more that we can be prepared ahead of time, that's just the better the conversations are going to be, during the show time. Also take a look at who's attending from these companies. Is this an executive level? Is it going to be administrative staff? Is it gonna be middle management? Again, you need to understand who's going to be showing up so you can have your business issues based on the job roles, the different diagnostic questions that we're going to need only just to get a conversation started, you're going to want to know, what's our objective of this of this event. Now, I'm going to go and burst your bubble right now, closing a managed services deal from the show floor. It's not going to happen, guys, that's not our objective here. So go ahead and take that burden. And just get it off your shoulders, our objective at the show is going to be to secure a next step in the form of a first appointment, maybe a follow up phone call, or maybe even securing a discovery so we can get through the rest of the sales process. And then you're going to want to understand to leverage the show floor. How are we going to be driving traffic from the marketing standpoint? Are we going to have any games? What kind of branding What's our our theme for the show as it relates to the company because all this kind of strategy is going to come into play based on the questions that you're going to be asked the engagement you're going to receive from the audience. So again, we're prepared to have some great conversations and sound intelligent. Another thing about the strategy is we need to understand how we are collecting the leads, I recommend you can get scanners, right? They have apps on the phones you can do now but but what is our strategy, because not everyone has business cards with them at the show floor. So you may have blank business cards that you already have we haven't printed up so we can write the information on them ourselves. Be prepared to take pictures of badges. So you can at least get the name and company information. So you can put your notes in there. But you have to have a strategy in place and a backup strategy for how you're going to capture these leads. Unless you get a list from the show ahead of time. Guys, you've got to make sure that we walk away with the opportunity with the leads, or this event is going to be all for naught "