As a professional marketer there are a number of channels at your disposal to attract and engage your target prospects. Finding the most appropriate channel or set of channels for your message can be the difference between no traction and building a loyal audience.

As a marketing professional, you can potentially leverage any or all of the following:

As we near the end of the calendar year, all sales people are in 1 of 3 frames of mind right now:

1. Shopping online and planning their holiday vacation

2. Setting up next year for a fast start

3. Stressed out while trying to just get close to their quota

If you find yourself identifying with #3 above, here are a few things to think about as you work against the clock to make your sales goals this year.

We set a lot of sales meetings for our clients… in fact, our clients are consistently surprised at the number and the quality of those meetings. Obviously, as an inside sales and marketing firm that specializes in B2B appointment setting you would expect us to be good at this.

We love hear that we have set a meeting for one of our client’s dream prospects. They tell us stories of how long they have been calling and all the things they have done to try to penetrate the account. That is invariably when we get the magic question, “What is your secret?”

What I am asked the most about by professional sales people is for cold calling strategies to get past gatekeepers. It is a tricky task that can frustrate even the most successful sales people. However, if growing your business is the goal, then you will have to find more new clients. That means you will have to pick up the phone and make cold calls, thus conversations with gatekeepers will be inevitable.

First sales meetings are much like first dates.

Before the date you are anxious and excited, but you have prepped for relationship-building success. You know exactly how you are going to start the conversation and if the conversation lags, you have well-thought-out questions to help you get to know your date a little better; to understand their background, to determine where they are at this point in life, and to inspire the sharing of future plans.

So you have the date. It goes really well. You have butterflies at the end and you talk about meeting again soon. Then comes the problem... you’re not sure exactly how or when is best to connect with them again.

This step is not only critical in romantic relationships, but also in business-to-business relationships and the early stage of the sales cycle process with qualified prospects. There always seems to be confusion among salespeople when it comes to deciding when and how best to follow up after a successful first meeting.

The ideal approach to following up after a first sales meeting with a potential prospect consists of 3 simple elements:

As we work with businesses to help them sell more and grow their revenues, we often find that there is a lack of basic understanding of the principle of sales ratios.

If the process of selling was a basketball game, moving beyond the gatekeeper is akin to the inbound play. The offense can’t move the ball or score until they can effectively pass the ball into the field of play and maintain possession. Although I make the point below that the gatekeeper is NOT the enemy, they are, in effect, playing defense and your role is to find a way past the defense to engage the decision-maker.

There is nothing that sales people hate to do more than make cold calls. Even the very best salespeople who make this activity a regular and scheduled part of their work week just tolerate it because they have learned over time it is the best way to fill the sales pipeline with new, quality prospects to work.

 Poor questioning habits are some of the most significant reasons salespeople are not consistently successful.  Struggling salespeople have unproductive sales meetings every day that could easily be saved with just a single, well-timed qualifying question. The challenge is that the single question is never the same, and therefore can’t be given to the salesperson to ask and can’t be paid for with a high dollar sales training program. The skill and the right to ask that question must be earned. How is it earned? It is paid for with lots of other questions for qualified lead generation.

Over the years I have developed some concepts that have enabled me to be successful in the sales field as a sales person, sales leader and as an entrepreneur. One concept that I often write about is my personal principle, the “Rule of Thirds".