Ah, isn’t this exactly the way it’s supposed to happen? It is a sales dream…fresh, hot leads – and lots of them – served up daily – that can be quickly converted into new customers.

The challenge dogging many sales organizations today is that even though they are bringing prospects into the pipeline, the two questions they should be tackling are not being addressed.

Are you bringing the RIGHT prospect into the pipeline?
Are you able to engage them at the moment that they are most open to making their purchase?
Traditional approaches to prospecting for new clients continues to decline in effectiveness. Cold calling lead lists, free webinars, email marketing, networking at events and conferences…things that used to high levels of success just aren’t as effective as they once were. It’s why leveraging the use of social technology makes good business sense. Still, there is an art to prospecting in the online world. It takes a little more time, creativity and finesse to create value in the mind of your buyer in advance of any sales opportunity.

Here are 5 social sales prospecting tips to get you started:

Tip #1 Target.
As Mal Pancoast says, “The odds of hitting your target go up dramatically when you aim at it.” Smart sales people recognize how important it is to target their activities so that they are engaging with the right prospect at the right time. In the online space your targeting ability is even more critical. If you haven’t narrowed your focus or defined the characteristics of your ideal buyer, your messaging will be confusing and your social sales activities will be fractured. Don’t try to serve everyone, because you can’t. Not well anyway.

Tip #2. Listen.
Now that you’ve targeted your buyer, it’s time to identify the social communities where your prospects are likely to be participating. LinkedIn groups are a great example. Thousands of business professionals engage in dialog every day about products, services, industry trends and business issues in general. Once you determine key online communities, your job is to learn the language of the group. Make sure you understand the group’s guidelines when it comes to blatantly promoting what you offer. Groups typically frown on sales pitches. Don’t risk damaging your brand because you didn’t learn the rules. Take time initially to watch and observe.

Step #3. Participate.
Creating social profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter is your first step. Nothing is going to happen if you let your social profiles sit passively on the sidelines though. You need to participate often to increase your visibility and broaden the awareness of your capabilities. But, what do I actually do, you might be asking. Participation can be as simple as posting a daily status update with something interesting and relevant for your audience. Answer questions in groups, pose questions on Twitter, recommend others, keep profiles updated with current information, share video or news stories…these are all ways to keep yourself visible in front of people. Bottom line – you need to be top of mind when your buyer is ready to make their purchase. If you’ve not been active and visible, chances are high that you’ll be overlooked.

Step #4. Search.
LinkedIn gives you the ability to create lead generation lists using the “saved search” functionality. You’ve targeted your buyer so using “advanced search” you create your list by entering in titles, appropriate keywords, geographic location, etc. to search the LinkedIn community of 80 million users. Once the search results are returned, you now have leads to follow up on. And the real power is that when you save the search, LinkedIn will send you a weekly email to notify you of the new people joining your network who fit the search criteria. Imagine, on Monday you receive a list of 20 new prospects for you to go to work on. You can also search companies on LinkedIn and “follow” those that you want to keep on your radar.

Step #5: Connect.
Continuing to cultivate your network of connections is a daily activity that every sales person needs to undertake. People with sizable networks comprised of high value, high quality contacts earn more money than those that don’t. In this new world of social selling, remember that 78% of buyers trust peers, not ads. Using social media, today’s sales person can develop and maintain diverse business networks that lead to greater access and opportunity.

Want hot leads? Learn to harness the power of social selling!

It’s pretty common knowledge that in many companies the sales and marketing organizations bump heads. One of the most common areas of contention is around the entire lead generation process. The rub is that marketing program success is too often judged by the quantity, rather than the quality, of sales leads produced.  Yet, if you ask the sales force what they need to convert leads to revenue, they will tell you that more of the same isn’t better – better quality leads is better.

Granted, it is a tough balance and every company has to find the right mix as a part of their lead generation efforts.  Without the right process and preparation, too many leads, even of high quality, may overwhelm a sales team and opportunities will fall through the cracks. Not enough leads or leads of low quality diminish sales force productivity pretty quickly.

Here is a chart from MarketingSherpa’s 2009-2010 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report to illustrate. When asked, here is what salespeople want from marketing.

So, you tell me. Which do you prefer? A list of 200 names with a slim chance of closing business, or a short list of the top 25 best opportunities to focus your attention on?

When I originally started this post, I was quite firm in my belief that “cold calling” as a tactic for driving sales was largely ineffective. I still am for the most part. But to be fair, I may have generalized a bit too much. Perhaps I’m jaded. As a business owner, I receive some of the dumbest phone sales calls imaginable. Everything from mortgage brokers trying to sell me refinancing for a building that I do not own, budding rap stars looking for their next big break, people selling products that compete with what I offer…really?…the list is endless. Didn’t check the website and clearly didn’t listen to our corporate voicemail message.

Still, during a recent sales program I facilitated, a senior sales executive challenged my assertion that cold calling gets you nowhere saying that, “Cold calling does work.  I’ve brought in a number of large deals as a result of cold calls that I’ve made.” So, I couldn’t help but be curious. What makes it work for you, I asked.  Listening to him answer, I realized that his success was due to his planning and preparation. This executive knew what he wanted to accomplish. He researched his target companies. He planned what he was going to say. And, when he did pick up the phone, he managed to successfully connect with his prospective buyer. So, I’ll change my tune slightly. Cold calling is generally a waste of time, and there are some people who are able to make it work.

For everyone else, here are 5 reasons why cold calling leads to sales frostbite:

1. It’s about relationships first, sales second. People buy from people that they know, like and trust. If they don’t know you, they are very unlikely to respond favorably to your unsolicited call. Cold calling runs counter to what the social revolution is all about. In the social sales world, it’s all about delivering value in advance of the sale. That requires getting to know a little something about your prospective buyer first and then offering to do for them without expecting an immediate return.
2. It is an interruption – think phone spam. To do lists are already tough enough to manage, so when you interrupt a busy executive that you have no relationship with at all, you risk blowing your sales opportunity altogether.  Buyers are not looking to have information pushed at them from sources they do not yet trust. Use LinkedIn to learn about the people on your lead generation list. Find commonality and then use your social networks to facilitate warm introductions that lead to securing sales appointments.
3. The spiel is boring and focuses only on you. Worse than the practice of dialing for dollars (calling a list of people you know nothing about) is that sales scripts are usually not tailored to each person called. More often than not the focus is on the seller not the buyer. Sales scripts are nothing more than a verbal dump of the features of the product on the unsuspecting person who picked up the phone when you called. That isn’t likely to endear you to them.
4. The world is not your client. This concept is counter-intuitive for sales managers who believe that calling a lead list works, but you can accelerate your sales traction if you go narrow and deep within your particular market space. It means you must first be crystal clear about who your ideal client actually is. Calling a random list of 100 names is far less effective than figuring out who the top 10 right people to call on that list really are. If you are in sales, you want to move from lead to close as quickly as you can, right? Wouldn’t it be easier to determine where those 10 right people might be doing business online and start a conversation there? That moves you right to the head of the sales line if you do it well.
5. It’s about perception. If you can’t explain quickly, clearly and succinctly why someone would benefit from buying your product, service or idea, you will lose sales, no matter how great what you have to offer is. During a typical cold call sales scenario it is not uncommon for reps to rush through a rambling speech that annoys rather than engages. If this is the first interaction that your prospect has with your company, are you are creating a positive brand impression or harming it?

There was once a time and a place for the sales practice of cold-calling. Those days are long gone. Thankfully.

“Whether or not you believe classical methods work, Social Lead Generation does not discard the model; it leverages a new media to change the protocols and methods of communication.” So writes Marcio Saito, blogger at The Click Company Community. He goes on to say that, “Social Media creates interactive channels and allow companies to nurture engaged communities in a way that is scalable. In Social Channels, it is possible to communicate without intruding, to listen to a large number of people and aggregate it effectively, and to personally engage when appropriate.” For me, the two most important points in that sentence for sales people to pay attention too are: “listen” and “engage when appropriate”. 

As you transition some of your sales prospecting and lead generation activities over to the use of social sites, the principle when communicating in the online world is much the same as meeting someone face-to-face. Create opportunities for connection and visibility without direct selling approaches. You want to get your potential buyers engaged in a conversation with you, and you do that at the right time, in the right way, the right place and without talking about yourself. Ask a thought provoking question that engages them and others in dialog. Remember that your sales role is what it has always been: to create a relationship with a prospective buyer that then moves the buying process forward. The social web changes everything and nothing more significantly than the changes in buyer behavior. Now that your prospects have moved to online social communities to acquire information about products and services to meet their needs, you must move there too.

Listening plays a critical role in the online space and can benefit sales professionals in two ways:

1. Quickly respond to a request to help someone else or respond to a question that captures attention from others in the group. Positive visibility is your success outcome.
   
2. Use participation in groups as an opportunity to “listen” to trends in the conversation, which could be something valuable you’d share with your potential clients.
   

A good rule of thumb when getting started with your online networking efforts is to invest the time to learn the spoken and unspoken rules of each community that you join. Always begin by joining groups where your potential buyer is most likely to participate. Observe how people communicate with each other in the group before diving in.

The social web provides sales professionals fantastic opportunities to build emotional equity with within groups and with potential buyers before actually engaging in a 1-1 sales dialog with anyone. As you gain experience working in the online space, creating new business relationships will begin to happen naturally. You won’t even worry if you are engaging at the right time, because you will know that you are. That’s lead generation at its best.

Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither is your online sales presence and reputation. Generating leads using social tools like LinkedIn makes the lead generation process easier and faster than it used to be, and you need to resist the temptation to expect an immediate sale the moment you jump online. Your success depends on having a purpose, plan, persistence, participation and above all – patience! And, that’s pretty much what’s required of sales success anyway, whether your lead generation efforts are happening online or off.

Companies invest sizable chunks of time and money implementing lead generation campaigns that are designed to deliver high potential sales opportunities to their sales force. The idea is that sales activity becomes more focused when reps are responding to qualified leads that have the highest potential for close (as identified by specific factors designed into the led gen campaign). In theory, this is exactly what should happen, but more often than not what happens is that the qualified lead – that cost budget dollars to acquire – becomes a lost sale due to five fundamental mistakes that sales people often make when cultivating a qualified sales lead. They are:

1. Ignore the opportunity: Yes, I know, it’s crazy that sales people would be handed a qualified leads list of people who WANT to know more about their services, but they still don’t pick up the phone. Buyer attention spans are short, and there are plenty of options available, so when a potential buyer has raised their hand, indicating their interest in what you offer, sales should be ready to respond quickly. Ask yourself: What is the average response time of a sales lead received and responded too? The answer might surprise you!

2. Remove Me: As I’ve led sales teams through the years, I’ve noticed a common trait among sales people. They believe that the sale is never over, nor lost. While I admire the spunk and determination to succeed at any cost, there will always be situations where the fit just isn’t there, or the time isn’t right, and a deal will not happen. Accept it and move on. If in the course of calling a prospect they ask you to remove them from your list, do it. Refusal to do so isn’t likely to score you high marks. People aren’t too eager to buy from companies that ignore their wishes.

3. Crossing the TMI line: It is not uncommon for successful sales people to develop a tight professional and personal bond with their clients. That bond is what keeps a solid sales relationship intact, but tread carefully when it comes to sharing intimate personal details, and be sure to avoid discussing topics that tend to polarize, such as politics or religion. Always keep in mind that this is a business relationship first!

4. Me, Me, Me: The surefire way to kill the sale is to do nothing but talk about you, your company, your products, your services, your processes, how great you are, and whatever else you want to blather on about that seems important to you. Whether you are calling someone from a leads list or meeting them for the first time at a networking meeting, learn to stop talking about yourself. Your prospect DOES NOT CARE! Not at this stage of the game anyway. Your mission is to make a connection, which can only happen when you listen more than you talk. Ask questions that get your prospect talking about themselves, their business, challenges they are tasked with solving. Recognize that in today’s social sales world, your prospect already has plenty of the “technical” info about what you and your competitor’s sell. Stop wasting time with feature dumps. It’s an out of date practice that should be banished from your sales process. Buyers want results; speak to that, not the features.

5. Qualification – what qualification? Sales people must artfully juggle the closing of short-term sales while simultaneously developing long-term opportunities. That requires asking probing questions to further qualify the sales potential. Time is finite, so each sales person must “stack rank” their sales leads in order to maximize their sales efforts. What tends to happen instead is that sales people want to give the same amount of time to everyone they talk to. That’s a big mistake. So, the typical first phone call probably goes something like this…  “Hi, Ms. Executive. I’m Barb at WidgetRUs, and I see you indicated through our website that you’d like to learn more about our products. What day and time can we meet?” Totally, wrong! Your 1-1 face time should be focused on the sales opportunities with the greatest potential. Here are some examples of the type of questions you can ask to further qualify the potential sale:

• When do you plan to make your purchase?
• Do you have budget now or is this something you are thinking about for next year?
• Are you the only one who is involved in the buying decision?
• How long does it usually take for a buying decision to be made?
• Is there paperwork required for me to complete to be considered as a vendor?

Remember that the lead is the conversation starter. Your prospective buyer has expressed interest at this point – nothing more. Resist the urge to spew out your sales pitch, and instead use the time to get to know what is most important to them. When you do, you’ll see your lead to sales conversation rates improve as a result!