Donna
Siegel

Tired Of Cold Calling? Try A Marketing Survey

One of the toughest parts of selling is making cold calls, particularly when your goal is to reach high-level executives or business owners. Sometimes you need to take a totally different approach to soften cold calling, while acquiring valuable marketing information. Tired Of Cold Calling? Try A Marketing Survey.

• You meet individually with decision makers in your target market, and ask each of them a series of questions to learn more about the needs of your market. This is an honest attempt on your part to better understand your prospects' needs so you can better satisfy those needs - the types of people who buy your products, what features they find most valuable, how they feel about the competition, and other factors which influence their purchase decisions.
  
  
• As a result of those interviews, some of the people you speak with will get to know you better and give you the opportunity to present your solutions to them.

The Psychology Behind A Market Survey

Successful people - the kinds of people with the capacity to make major purchase decisions - are usually a bit smarter than the average individual, and they tend to have egos to match. Ask a successful person their opinion on almost any subject, and you're likely to get a response. Thus, the same people who refuse to give you a minute of their time to hear your sales presentation are usually more inclined to talk with you when your stated purpose is to ask their opinion.

Making a market survey work for you takes planning. The following are 6 steps towards making this excellent prospecting method work for you.

1. Pick Your Survey Targets

Your first task is to pick people you want to participate in your survey. In every territory, for every type of product and service, there are companies or people who are natural suspects that are perfect in every way. They are the leaders of their industry, spokespeople of their communities, trend setters, and people in the news. These people are important to your sales success. They may themselves be prospects. They may be able to refer some prospects to you. Or they may just tell everyone they know about you, leading to the best of selling situations -- when the prospects call you.

Finding these community leaders is usually easy. Their names are in the local newspapers all the time. Or they're in lists published by local agencies, like newspapers or chamber of commerce membership lists -- the top 25 financial institutions in your county, the 50 most profitable companies in the metropolitan area, and so on.

You probably have lists like this on your desk already. If you're like me, you've already filed this information for future reference. "Someday when I have time, I'm going to call these people."

Go through your list and pick a dozen you'd like to talk to. These are your targets for your survey.

2. Pick Your Survey Theme

Now that you know who you'll survey, you next have to figure out what you are going to survey them about.

Pick A Narrow Subject

Surveys work best when they are focused around a single issue or topic. You can ask several related questions, but you don't want to cover too many areas.

For example, if you represent a book publisher, you may want to survey prospects about text books and their usage. If you think about every grade level and every subject, there are a lot of different possibilities for a survey -- books used in elementary schools, books for science, non-book resources they might use in the school library, and so on.

Think narrowly about the topic. You'll find it will lead to a more manageable survey, and one that will create better conversations with your targets.

Tie Your Topic To A Current Issue

When a topic is hot and in the news, everybody is ready to talk about it. What happens when a space shuttle takes off, or there is a sudden rise in the stock market, or the 6th game of the world series is scheduled for Saturday night? Everybody has an opinion about topics in the news. The question is how to use this to get decision makers talking to you.

Think about what you just selected as the focus of your survey. Now review current news events and trends. Pick some event or trend of interest to your targets that you can tie your survey to.

A topic that's in the news that somehow might affect the people you are interviewing is always a good starting point. For example:

• You want to talk to hospital administrators about using your outsourcing service, and you know the local government just reduced its budget for supporting local schools and hospitals. You ask the administrators how they plan to respond to the proposed budget changes.
• Your targets are real estate agents who can recommend your construction company to buyers who want to upgrade their new home. You read that the local banks are tightening up on the available funds for mortgages, a subject of definite interest to real estate agents. You ask the people you interview their views on how the changes in mortgage lending will affect their business.
• Owners of small consulting practices tend to rent their office facilities from property management companies like yours. You read a front page article about the drop of new class A office buildings under construction. You ask the owners to describe what the impact of this drop will be on their renewals and what a property management company can do to help..

3. Write Your Survey Questions

Your now ready to sit down and write the questions for your survey. With all your prework this should be quite straight forward. Here are some guidelines for writing survey questions:

• Start with a question about the current topic in the news. This is a good icebreaker and one that will get the conversation to start flowing.
• Keep it short. Your total list of questions should be no more than 5 or 6. A short survey can be tolerated by virtually any target, even the busiest of people. It's also long enough for you to know if you're building any personal rapport or not.
• Write all questions in an open-ended format. For example, if you want to find out what type of furniture a store might be stocking to respond to changing trends in the market, ask questions like:

What types of tables are the people who come into your store looking for?

 

What fabrics are requested most by shoppers?

• Make sure you ask questions which include specifics to your product, but aren't just tied to that area. For example, if you are selling copiers, you might survey around the types of printed communications the company uses, saving one question for "what types of features make a copier a better fit for your company's communications needs?"

4. Prepare Your Story

One final piece of preparation and you're ready to start your interviews. You need to have your own story together - who you are and why you are calling.

Let's say you work for a travel agency, you might state your story like this. "Good morning. My name is Mary Salamone. I work for Arris Travel Agency. I'm conducting a survey of local executives in leading companies to learn more about what you look for in a business travel agency. Our goal is to make sure that the services we at Arris Travel offer to local businesses reflects their true needs. Then, as a result of this survey, we will put together a series of new travel services specifically for business travelers. I have just 6 questions I would like to ask you, so this will only take about 5 minutes."

The idea here is to state your purpose in terms that appear non-threatening and interesting to your target. Remember your stated goal in surveying is to gather information, not to sell.

A final note on this point: write this story down, even if it is one you have given many times or you think is self-evident. It helps you get ready for talking to your targets.

5. Implement Your Strategy

Finally it's time to start talking to the people you selected to survey.

• Go through your list of targets and pick the ones who are the least likely prospects. Contact one or two of these first to get practice and also gather some information you can use in your following surveys.
• Keep thorough notes on each of your conversations. Your survey will give you some important information that can impact all of your selling activities, information most of your competitors will not have. You'll hear ideas that will never come up in a more traditional selling situation because your targets are likely to be more honest.
• Use information you gather to help you in subsequent conversations. As you get quotes and comments from your targets, you'll find some that will be quite interesting. You can use these in the rest of your survey calls: "Mr. Jones, some of the executives I have spoken with today mentioned that the completeness and accuracy of their travel itinerary was an important thing they would like to see improved. Have itineraries been a problem for your company as well?"

During your interview, the person you are speaking with may raise issues for which you have solutions. Make a note of these. After you have completed your survey questions, return to one of those points: "Ms. Randall, one of the things you mentioned earlier was the importance of obtaining the lowest rental car rates in each city, as long as the car could be picked up conveniently close to the airport terminal. At Arris, we are setting up a database to let us address exactly that need. Would you like me to provide you with details on the program?"

6. Follow-up With Each Of Your Targets

After your conversations, follow up with each of your survey targets. Now that you've taken the time to survey these people, you want to make sure that they will remember you.

Your follow-up package should have 2 components: a custom letter and relevant product information you want each of these people to have.

The Custom Letter

This is a short letter which includes 5 points:

• Thank them for their time.
• Identify a specific useful piece of information that they gave you. This strokes their ego and makes sure they will remember you and your conversation.
• Share with them some of the ideas that came from your other interviews, and express your company's commitment to address each of these needs.
• If you identified a specific prospect need during your conversation, reference that and what action you will take to fulfill the prospect's need.
• Ask the prospect to call you if you can be of further help.

The Product Literature

Add product literature to your package that you think this person might have an interest in. Through your survey process and your follow-up letter, you have basically ensured that your literature will find its way into your target's files for potential use. You want to make sure that this person has enough information about your products when that time comes.

Summary

That's it -- 6 steps to using surveys as a prospecting tool. Try this very powerful technique. You'll be surprised how much you can learn about your prospect's needs to help improve all your sales, and you'll gain more access to the prospects you value most.

SeaBird Associates Inc
3011 NE 7th Drive
Boca Raton, FL 33431
Phone: 561-750-9233
E-mail: Donna Siegel

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