This is promotional for Owler but I don’t care because it rocks. Owler is one of those tools that you can set and forget. Once you follow all your prospects & customers, it sends you daily updates on their activity and uses what they call the Competitive Graph to source new leads right to your inbox. It’s free so use it. ‘Nuff said.
Here’s where I stop with this promotional stuff and get serious. The funny thing about receiving all that information on your buyers is that you have to actually use it for the research to matter. In my 10 years as a sales trainer, I saw so many sales reps spend a lot of time “doing research” on their prospects and customers. Then they’d get in a conversation and wouldn’t reference the research that they did on that prospect or client. Huh?
Sales reps who do research are like trees that fall in the woods. If there’s no one there to hear them, do they make a noise?
How is your sales team using the research that they do on their sales calls? Here’s a simple thing that every VP of Sales can do. Go listen to the recordings of all of the sales calls that happened in your company last week. Use a tick sheet to measure the ones where sales intelligence research that was gathered before the call is mentioned vs. not mentioned. If you are above 50%, congratulations. But I bet you won’t be.
Having studied what works and doesn’t work in sales emails and calls I can tell you that you are 70% more likely to convert a prospect into a meeting if you tell the prospect about the research you did. You are 568% more likely to convert a prospect into a meeting if you reference second-degree connections. But again I ask, are your sales reps actually saying this stuff on their calls? How do you know? Even saying “I did some research on you and your organization” without saying what you found has a similar, but smaller, effect.
Unless you are getting inside of the sales calls of your team, you are just guessing.
What information from Owler can make a meaningful improvement in your conversion rates? How do you know that your sales reps are actually using that information on their sales calls to improve conversion rates?
