Most of us consider it essential to know something about our prospect and their company before making a sales call. This is particularly true when you’re in business-to-business sales. It’s one of the basics of “being prepared.”
But that which separates the truly prepared from the barely prepared is in what, and how much, we know about the prospect. For each circumstance we must decide what is valuable and what is not so valuable. So how do we decide what information we want and where that information can be found?
Let’s start by considering the possibilities of what there is to know something about; 1) the company itself, 2) the people in the company, 3) which of those people are key to us, and 4) personal information about those key people. This could be the start of a pretty long list, considering how each topic might be expanded until we reach the point of information overload. So it’s not only important to look at all the possibilities, but to filter out what is and isn’t vital in our effort to understand the prospective buyer.
Finding out about the company itself is the easy part, and one of the most important of all. If we know nothing about the firm, how can we possibly build a case for that company needing our product?
Fortunately, there are a lot of available research tools today for the marketer and the salesperson. A good place to start is the internet and the first stop should be the prospect company’s web site.
That web site should give us a pretty good idea of what this company is actually doing to make its money. We can find out how many branches the firm has, something about its management team and its history, and usually a good deal about its products or services.
Reading between the lines should tell us such things as whether their management embraces technology, something about their marketing practices, and a general feel for their corporate culture.
If they don’t yet have a web site, which tells us something already about their marketing ideas, you should be able to find something in the yellow pages of their local phone book. You can also check the archives of their local newspaper for past stories or press releases. Those are now likely to be available on the internet.
After this initial information gathering, we might elect to get into some detail in order to understand more about the company than we see from their public face. What kind of budget do they have for products that you sell? What are their goals, objectives, and needs? How can your products help them satisfy those goals or needs? The internet, again, can be a friend in this effort and there are some great web sites ready for your use.
One of the most useful I’ve found is at “www.lambresearch.com/index.html” and has many pages of links to useful research sites of all types. Perusing this site will give your marketing people all sorts of ideas…not just for researching one prospect, but for finding other prospects.
Other good sites are at “www.internet-prospector.org” and “www.bizlink.org” both of which are commonly used for company research. Lesser known, but just as valuable, is the site at “indorgs.virginia.edu/portico/home.html.”
These are only a handful of the commonly used resources. There are many more available and the number is growing daily.
Next you might look at the people within the company and seek personal info on the key players. Their web site is the starting place for this effort, but if it doesn’t have a staff list or information on the management team you will have to get creative.
Leave no stone unturned. Put out a memo to everyone at your own company. Does anyone know someone who works for that company, or have a friend or relative who has worked there? I failed to ask that simple question one time, and found out too late that a woman in my company had a brother-in-law who had worked in the target firm and would happily have told us everything about their internal politics.
Talk with other business people you know who may have done business with your prospect. Do you have a current customer who might know someone in the prospect’s firm? Talk to your suppliers. Do any of them sell to your prospect? If any of these inquiries pan out, don’t just ask more questions…ask for a referral or introduction.
You might identify the owners or managers through the state office that registers business entities. They are required to have those names, and basic info about the people, on file. Easier yet, your public library probably has the “reference.usa” cd-roms with the basic information on every company in your region. You can normally access these at no charge simply by having a library card.
But there’s more to know about the key players in the prospect firm; what are their interests, their motivations, their strengths and weaknesses? You won’t find all of that in the internet or the library of course, but you can learn something about what makes them tick. Do their names pop up when you look through the local newspaper archives? Are they active in charities, golf tournaments, the local art scene, or a service club?
Management people in particular usually leave a trail of interesting tidbits behind them as they move through life. The trick is getting creative and digging it up. A friend or contact at your local newspaper might help show you how.
And finally, which players are the key players? There will be management personnel involved in the final decision whether to buy, but they may not always be the place to get started. In past columns we’ve looked at the buying center and how to deal with that entity. The first thing you must find out before going too far is whether your prospect firm is going to make conscious use of a buying center or is there an informal and unrecognized buying center at work in the company.
If so, your sales approach will become a “complex” one. If you’re really lucky, you will find that a sole management person will look at your presentation and make the decision. This will make your information-gathering task far easier.
Of course you can spend too much time and effort gathering such intelligence and therefore too little time actually selling. You have to find a balance that’s right for your firm and the types of products you sell. Some top salespeople selling big-ticket items now have specialists doing research for them. They use the information to help them focus on the right prospects and to close deals while the research people are preparing the next prospect dossier.
If such tasks are balanced correctly, the time saved closing sales should pay for the efforts made helping salespeople to do so. And there should be more deals to close. Knowing your prospect should be not less important than knowing your product. Whether you’re the marketer putting together promotional literature or the salesperson knocking on the door, the more you know beforehand about your audience, the more deals you’ll close by day’s end.
