Social Media May Be The Marketing Legs You Need!

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Social Media May Be The Marketing Legs You Need!

Written by Kendra Lee

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9 Reasons Why Prospects Don't Respond

Some cold calling experts suggest that you leave a message when you receive a prospect's voice mail. Unfortunately, many sales people feel that this is an exercise in futility because most of the time their prospect does not call them back. If that sounds familiar, here are nine reasons why your prospects don't return your calls.

1. Your voice mail message is too long. The majority of voice mail messages decision makers receive are far too long. Decision makers are too busy to listen to a long, rambling, and disjointed message. That means you need to get your message across in 30 seconds or less. In fact, I suggest that you try and limit your message to a maximum of 20 seconds.

2. Your voice mail message is too cryptic. On the reverse side, a short, terse voice mail with no details will not likely motivate someone to call you back. You MUST give a prospect enough information to capture their attention and say, "I need to talk to this person."

3. You leave the same voice mail message. It is important to keep trying to connect with your prospect which often means leaving multiple voice mail messages. However, if you want someone to call you back you need to leave a different message every time you call. Plus it must be compelling (see the next point).

4. Your message is not compelling. Most voice mail messages do little to motivate someone to pick up the telephone and return your call. A compelling message MUST demonstrate that you understand your prospect's industry, situation or circumstances and portray that you might have a solution.

5. You have not developed a relationship with them. In today's competitive landscape, people want to do business with suppliers and vendors they know and trust. A call from a salesperson in an unknown company is not likely going to be returned.

6. You sound like every other sales person. The average executive receives dozens of sales calls a day so if you want a busy executive to call you back, your message MUST stand out from every other call he or she receives. I once sat in a Vice President's office as he listened to his voice mail messages on speakerphone and was fascinated how similar every sales call sounded. I was equally intrigued by how quickly this person deleted the messages, too. His finger hovered over the delete button, and in most cases, he erased the message in the first few seconds.

7. You have not done any research. When you leave a voice mail message that clearly demonstrates that you know nothing about your prospect's business, there is no chance they will return your call. For example, "Mr Prospect, we provide solutions that help call centers improve their productivity and performance and generate a higher ROI on their out-bound calls." If this message was left for a small business owner (and it was!) it is highly unlikely the salesperson would get a return call (and they didn't!). At the very least, do some basic research and make sure that your message reflects that homework. It will improve your chances of a return call.

8. Your product or service does not interest them. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone needs your solution and when you call companies that are not the right fit for your product, service or offering, you are simply wasting your time and that of your prospects. Improve your results by more closely targeting your prospecting calls to companies who can actually use your product or service (see point 7 above).

9. Your prospect is simply too busy. Most sales people fail to realize exactly how busy executives are. A client of mine once said, "I'm so busy right now I can't possibly take on any more projects." This sheer volume of work often prevents decision makers from returning your call because they don't have the time to talk to you and because they can't fit another project into their schedule. Unless your product, service or offering is something they desperately need right now, they probably won't return your call.

Social media is all the buzz in prospecting lately. You hear about it everywhere with Facebook Fan pages, tweeting, and LinkedIn profiles. You may even have an account on several different social networks. But have you given thought to how to use it to increase your prospecting results, or do you just see it as something fun to do when you have time?

Or, is it possible that you’re one of the skeptics who don’t believe social media can really bring you new prospects?

Define Your Target Market

Let’s ponder that for a moment.

The two primary questions in prospecting are always:
1. How can you reach a broader audience?
2. How can you reach your audience more effectively?

Once you’ve defined your target market and your ideal prospect within it, you identify the key business needs they have and craft your value proposition. You’re ready to prospect.

But who do you approach? And, how do you approach them?

Referrals and networking are always the desired approach because the personal relationship increases your chance of gaining access. But that isn’t always possible, especially if you want a broader reach than that. So, you supplement them with the tried and true prospecting methods of cold calling and sending emails.

The challenge with cold calling and email prospecting is that your results are only as effective as the list you’re operating from and the probability that your contacts got your message.

To address the challenge that your target prospects may not have noticed your message, you call and send emails repeatedly over a period of weeks, maybe even months. These repeated touches will definitely increase your response rate, but there will always be a percentage of those stubborn few prospects who never respond. What that percentage is depends on how good your message is.

In the end, your prospecting success is bound by the size of your list and the percentage of contacts you can entice to respond so you can start a conversation and ultimately draw new opportunities into your pipeline.

Social Media and Marketing

What you need is another prospecting strategy to supplement the cold calling and email and give it legs to reach a broader audience.

Here’s where social media comes into play.

By expanding your reach beyond your list, your great message will draw in prospects you haven’t even heard of and wouldn’t have met through referrals and networking. What I’ve discovered over several years of tweeting and commenting is that the people who watch social networks often are not the same people who respond to emails and calls.

Don’t get me wrong. They may respond if you use the hounding strategy I’ve taught you, but what they probably do instead is watch you. Your emails and calls with the great message caught their attention. They saw your Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook link in your signature and started following you so they could listen to what else you have to say.

They aren’t ready to engage in a full conversation just yet. They want to get to know you through your comments. Over time they begin to respond to your comments. They may even email or call you directly!

Even better is that new people begin to watch you. Because you’re tweeting about the issues and triggering events your micro-segment is interested in, those are the people who perk up and pay attention.

Suddenly you’ve moved beyond your list. Your message has legs, expanding out to others in your target market that your list builder and personal network didn’t know about. Not only have you increased your reach to a new group of people, but you’ve increased the percentage of responses and filled your pipeline with a fresh set of opportunities in a manner you could never have found before.

People are watching social networks. I can’t tell you how they find the time to do it. I can only tell you that they are doing it, and you want to be out there to meet them.

If you aren’t sure what you should be commenting about to attract prospects, follow me on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

For more resources on successful use of social media, click here.

Kendra Lee
		About the author:
		Kendra Lee is a top IT seller, sales advisor and business owner who knows how to shorten time to revenue in the SMB market in innovative ways. She is the author of the best selling book Selling Against the Goal: How Corporate Sales Professionals Generate the Leads they Need. Under Ms. Lee's direction her organization has assisted sellers in increasing referrals more than 328% in just 7 weeks, penetrating SMB markets in just 6 weeks, driving new client acquisition more than 31% year to year, and increasing annual revenue. .