Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Father’s Day is coming up this Sunday, June 15th. If you haven’t already planned something for your father or bought a card yet, the stores are still open. My dad and I haven’t always seen eye to eye on everything, especially during the dreaded angst-filled teenage years. But he managed to put a roof over my head, food on the table and helped support me to get a degree.

You may be asking at this point: How does this relate to inside sales? It’s important for anyone who wants to be successful in inside sales to remember that, above all, your prospects are human. As such, you need to find a way to relate on a human level.

My dad has been a technology project manager for numerous years, and has received a fair number of cold calls. Often when I’m speaking with another technology manager and I hear about the pains in their environment, I imagine what it was like growing up to see my dad walk through the door after a tough day tired, hungry, stressed about whatever headache he had to fix that day. Our whole family had been in an uproar at one point about the Blackberry going off at 2 a.m. from whatever on-call alert went off that needed attending to, especially my brother who was a light sleeper. I never truly grasped or fully appreciated what my father did as a programmer or manager until I started prospecting into IT. I’d like to think that when someone finds use for my solution, I often help to alleviate those moments for them too.

Decision makers with fancy titles can initially be intimidating to call. But at the end of the work day, they go home to their day-to-day lives with their families, often having stresses lingering after work from upper management as well as the team they’re responsible for. They hire people, fire people and are often under the gun themselves to produce and put out fires. It’s important to remember this and empathize with prospects.

People do business with others because there is an established relationship and a degree of trust: trust that the salesperson listened to what you were asking of them and trust that if you need support later on the company you’re doing business with will be there and not leave you high and dry. Cost is not always the determining factor on whether or not to implement something.

How do you connect with your prospects?

P.S. Dad, if you’re reading this, Happy Father’s Day.