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Sales Tip: How To Research Your Market to be A Sales Expert

Written by: Peter O'Donoghue

Article Overview: This fantastic free tool will give you the tools to be seen as the goto sales expert in your Industry. Read the afrticle to find out more...

Sales Tip: How To Research Your Market to be A Sales Expert

Would you like a little used but far from secret tool that will tell you immediately when:

• One of your clients or prospective clients sends out a press release announcing a new contract, a new injection of funding, a change in personnel, a downsizing or upsizing or the award of a new contract.

• One of your clients or prospective clients is mentioned on a blog or a forum anywhere.

• If people are talking about your company, products and services or your salespeople.

• If there is talk about a common Industry problem or trigger event. For instance a change in legislation that might delay or speed up an impending project or sale. Or even a phrase that might be used to describe an event that would lead a company to need your services.

• Any reference to your competition anywhere on the internet.

Would you pay me for proving you with a service that emailed you that level of detail every day? Would you pay me £1,000 per month for that?

Well it's Free to all

Google will give you all of this, and more for FREE. Simply enter all of your existing and prospective customers names, products, competitors (and yours for that matter) and key individuals names into a simple tool called Google alerts and you will be emailed every time they are mentioned anywhere on the internet. That is amazingly powerful!

It realy is simple . By putting your search term in the box and choosing where you want the information taken from, and how often you want to be notified you can be up and running in minutes.

The Three simple steps to implement this in your business are:

1.Decide if you want one person or each member of your sales team to be in charge of receiving the Google alerts. You could use a sales support staff member or a marketing person.

2.Draw up a number of separate lists of key phrases that can be used to set up alerts. Here are a few to get you started: a. Clients company names.

b. Key client's employee names.

c. Known prospective clients.

d. Joint Venture Partner names.

e. Trigger events that lead to your becoming more actively involved or needed

f. Decide if you want them to be general terms such as CRM implementation or specific phrase matched term such as "CRM Implementation"

3. Develop policies for what will happen to the information when it starts to roll in so that everyone knows what is expected of them. A few policies that have worked fantastically well for my clients are: a. If the alert is about a client company winning a new contract or receiving an award then a pre-designed hand written letter is dispatched off to the key people in the company congratulating them on their success.

b. If the alert is about a prospective client winning a new contract, then a hand written letter as well as some relevant supporting case studies, whitepapers, reports, and information about how you helped clients like them in the same situation.

c. If your alert notifies you of a change in legislation or a trigger event that might impact a client or a prospective customer then relevant whitepapers, dvd's or invitations to seminars can be sent out that provide valuable information relating directly to that event.

d. If client or prospective client is mentioned in a blog post you could add a relevant comment and then email the company concerned with a quick email entitled "Just to let you know people are saying good things about you on the web"

The ways of leveraging this information are only limited by your creativity. Soon you will begin to develop your reputation as the knowledgeable Industry experts who seem to have this magical ability to appear at the right place at the right time, with the right information. And all for about 10 minutes work per day.

The information age is here and you should be making the most of it because if you don't your competitors will.

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Article Tags: blog, downsizing, google, legislation, level of detail, marketing person, nbsp, new contract, phrase, phrases, press release, prospective clients, prospective customers, salespeople, search term, separate lists, simple steps, support staff member, upsizing



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