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Personal Marketing for Sales People

Guest post by: Tom Miller

Article Overview: Never make another cold call again. These days there is a realistic alternative to making cold telephone calls to find new sales prospects. It involves leveraging the latest online services to identify and woo potential customers before making a call or arranging to be introduced.

Personal Marketing for Sales People

Never make another cold call again. These days there is a realistic alternative to making cold telephone calls to find new sales prospects. It involves leveraging the latest online services to identify and woo potential customers before making a call or arranging to be introduced.

Embracing these new methods and learning how to leverage them may already be more important than learning how to prospect using the telephone. The new methods depend on applied intelligence. Those who learn how to use them effectively will have much more to offer prospective employers.

The new methods depend on skilful personal marketing. The fruits are a continuously strengthening network of warm contacts in selected markets.

Top sales people half a century ago relied on their ability to create positive relationships with a wide network of customers, suppliers, business partners, and others. Then, the most industrious sales person might have maintained a network numbering hundreds. Today’s top sales performers need to maintain networks containing thousands of professional contacts who are pre disposed to engage with them.

Answer these three questions to assess your use of a professional network to aid sales prospecting:

1.How many professional contacts do you maintain current contact information for including, telephone numbers, email address, company, and role?

2.Of these contacts, how many do you communicate with at least once every three months?

3.Of these remaining contacts, how many would be willing to introduce you to one of their contacts?

Your net number provides an indication of your professional network’s effectiveness as a sales prospecting resource. If more than a thousand people would willingly introduce you to a contact of their s for business purposes, your network is amongst the most developed. If your net number is less than 100, then it is amongst the least developed.

Before you congratulate or lambast yourself, contact networks are worthless as a business resource unless they are used to generate referrals and obtain introductions to prospective customers.

Judging from the casual enquires I make in the course of delivering sales training and fulfilling business development assignments, most sales people have yet to learn the necessary skills and habits to develop productive professional networks.

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Article Tags: business, business development, cold calling, Marketing, sales people, sales training



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Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
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