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We talk a lot in sales training about pre-call planning and research. Unfortunately, the emphasis is on “talk,” while not near enough salespeople DO IT.
The first step in accomplishing this is having a way to collect information and being able to access it easily. I’ve found a couple of tools that can make organizing your pre-call plan and doing your prospecting research far more effective and available.
Each of the posts in this series will focus on one tool and how it can be leveraged to help you sell more professionally. In the interest of time, I won’t go through all of the steps to create an account with these online tools and install them, if necessary, I’ll assume you can figure that out.
Here are the sales tools we reviewed as part of this pre-call planning series:
Pre-Call Planning and Research With Del.icio.us
How Google Alerts Can Help You Draw Up A Pre-Call Plan
Pre-Call Planning and Research of Sales Prospects with Clipmarks
Which tools do you use to research prospects and potential opportunities? Post them in the comments.
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I use a combination of Linked In and Plaxo to do background searches on people I plan to meet with. I also communicate within my own network to ask for background information about folks I will be meeting with.
Finally, if you can arrange for a “godfather” or “godmother” within the company to give you any background circumstances, issues, or past experiences with competitors, this is ideal.