I actually prefer to use Google Alerts to find news about my prospect and customers. I find it a bit easier to control the output. I explain my technique in my book. However, some people get confused by the complexity of carefully scripted Google searches and Owler is a good tool if you are in that camp. Thank you to Mr. Carpenter for suggesting it to me via his book as I didn’t know about this tool before reading the book.

TIP # 109 Use Owler . Owler is a good free resource for finding news ( trigger events ) about prospective companies. This is great information to use in personalized emails.

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 634-635). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition. (content reformatted to make it easier to read on this site)

 

I love Hunter. I didn’t know about it until I bought Mr. Carpenter’s book. It was a great tip and made the entire price of the book worth it. There are lots of other tips that will probably help you. If you close one deal because of the book, it is well worth the investment. No, I do not get a commission for plugging the book, I am simply a fan.

TIP # 104 Use Hunter to find email addresses. It’s free and it appears right in LinkedIn. Just enter the domain name, click a button and the software tells you the most likely email address for the prospect. I imagine it pings the mail server. Capture is another good one to use but it’s fee-based.

TIP # 105 Go to Google and type *@domainname to find email addresses. It’s a wildcard search that can result in finding at least one email address at the prospect’s company. Use the found email address to determine the structure of other email addresses. For example, if I worked at BMW and the domain name is bmw.com, you should search *.@bmw.com.

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 617-622). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition. (content reformatted to make it easier to read on this site)

Mr. Carpenter doesn’t need a preamble to this tip. It just makes good sense!

TIP # 73 Talk Money Instead of Percentages. If your product or service can save your prospect money or provide a significant return on investment, tell him the value in dollars. For example, if you discover that he is spending $ 100,000 a year on IT maintenance and your solution can save him 30 % per year, tell him you can save him over $30,000 a year. You can bring home the value when you translate that into what he could do with the money, such as hire a new assistant or free up money for advertising.

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 423-427). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition.

Your job as a professional salesperson is to engender confidence in your prospect about your abilities. You need to know as much about your prospect’s business as possible. In the case of a tie regarding your product and/or your company, you need to make yourself the reason that your prospect buys your product. In my book, I give suggestions on how to track news about your prospects and customers. Mr. Carpenter does the same in his book and even gives a great template for communicating that information to a prospect.

TIP # 8 Quote news about the prospect’s company and the source of that news. Using news stories about your prospect is one of the better ways to personalize your message to her. It allows her to know that you are thinking about her company and not 400 similar companies too. When using news stories, be smart about it. If you discover a problem the company is having that your company can solve, by all means, use it. Yet you don’t necessarily need to find a problem to use the news as a trigger event. Good news about a company such as growth, relocating, or hiring a new CFO could all be reasons to reach out. For example, if their stock is rising, you could share how your solution can help the stock to continue to rise. If the company is relocating, perhaps your marketing solution might be just what they need to keep their customers informed. It’s impossible to mass produce trigger event – prompted emails. That’s great because personalization is desperately needed in sales. However, you can always create templates to speed up the process. They would look something like this:

Subject Line : (Name): Regarding the (blank) article on (Company)

Hey (Name) –

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to reach out to you specifically because I read on (website) about how (company) is (challenge or pain). If this is still a challenge you’re dealing with, I have a few ideas on how you can solve it. One way is to eliminate no – shows on first sales meetings. That’s something we specialize in at ABC Company. ABC Company helps organizations with this challenge through our permission-based sales and marketing database. Executive prospects register for the database and tell us their top business challenge up front. Check out this case study we did with Coca-Cola at www.emanuelcarpenter.com / cokecasestudy. Let’s schedule some time next Tuesday or Wednesday for a quick, demo/intro call. Just let me know what time works for you, and I’ll take care of the rest.

Let me know,

Emanuel Carpenter

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 137-155). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition. (content reformatted to make it easier to read on this site)

I frequently advise salespeople to focus your conversations on a prospect’s needs and goals. Mr. Carpenter, in his book, makes an equally great point that these conversations need to short and sweet.

TIP # 6 Keep value props to one or two sentences. If you can’t explain what you do and how you’re the best at doing it in two short sentences, you have a problem. Being concise is the name of the game when writing sales prospecting emails (or having conversations in the hallways) If you can’t narrow it down to two sentences, get together with your marketing department to brainstorm on how to do it.

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 128-131). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition. (content reformatted to make it easier to read on this site)

 

While I love the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” I disagree that you should Always Be Closing (ABC). Instead, there are times when you simply need to ask an honest question and get an honest answer. I was reminded of this while reading “Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend” (citation below).

TIP # 32 If you’re notified when a prospect downloads materials from your website, send a very basic email asking if they received the download. No pitch. No asking for a meeting. No telling them how you work with other companies in their vertical. You’ll get many more responses this way, and you can gradually lead to next steps.

Example:

Subject: Your download of the Fantastic Possibilities Book, Joe …

Hey Joe – I noticed you downloaded the Fantastic Possibilities Book from our website. Did everything download okay?

Best,

Your Name

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 220-226). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition. (content reformatted to make it easier to read on this site)