Pre-Call Planning: The Ultimate Sales Strategy
We live in an era when virtual selling has, in many industries, all but eclipsed face-to-face, in-person selling. Yet for some reason, salespeople often fail to prepare effectively for remote sales discussions.
Sandler’s Pre-Call Planner is designed to help you prepare for these meetings. Below are some vitally important questions that you can ask yourself before you reach out for the first time to any suspect, prospect, or current customer — regardless of whether you’re connecting in person, voice-to-voice, or by some interactive communication platform. Once you have made initial contact, you can complete the Pre-Call Planner before the first substantive meeting.
Before you connect with prospects for the first time…
Ask yourself about ideal target accounts.
- What qualification or demographic information can you find before you call?
- Which industries do you want to prioritize? Is there a specific organization you want to make contact with?
- Which of the following four goals best describes the reason you are trying to connect: keep a current account, attain a new logo, recapture an account you lost, or expand wallet share within an existing account?
- Which of these four goals is most important to you and your team?
Ask yourself about decision-makers and influencers.
- What is the typical job title of your ideal customer?
- What keywords would your ideal customer use to identify themselves on a LinkedIn profile?
- Who is typically involved in buying, using, or paying for your solution? Who influences those people?
- How can you make sure you get to the right people?
Ask yourself about the backstory and the buyer journey.
- What are your ideal buyers saying on social media about pains that you can make disappear
- What symptoms do they typically experience?
- What trigger events would cause them to be open to a discussion with you?
- What have you already learned about a typical decision maker’s needs, the pressures they may be facing, or the competition they may be using?
Ask yourself: How will you make contact?
- What platforms will you use? How often?
- What will you say?
- What problems is this person likely to be experiencing?
- How will you point the conversation toward a discussion of those problems?
- What outcome/next step do you want to propose?
- What referral sources can you leverage and reference?
- How concise can you make your message?
After you set a meeting
Complete the Pre-Call Planner in anticipation of your next discussion!
Ask yourself about confirmation and follow-up.
- How can you be sure all parties will attend on time, with the correct agenda?
- How can you recap and confirm the information exchanged and the next steps decided during the meeting? (Here’s a hint: think of your meeting invite as a chance to confirm the key points and agreements of your initial conversation.)
Ask yourself about next steps.
- What do you want to make happen as a result of this meeting?
- What is the ideal next step?
How will you propose it?
- What is your backup next step?
- How will you propose that?
By focusing on questions like these, you can make pre-call planning a priority and secure a competitive advantage for yourself and your organization in the virtual sales landscape.
