Shannon Eckroth — May 7, 2018 — May 7, 2018
There’s been a lot of buzz in and around my office regarding local prospecting techniques and our members are desperate to learn better, more strategic ways of filling their sales funnel. Furthermore, nurturing those leads until the prospect is ready to make a purchase. Building a sales funnel is challenging… especially if you’re not the “prospecting type” and networking, relationship building and engaging isn’t really your thing.
Over the past few months, I have been working one-on-one with MSPs challenged with this exact problem. You may have already attended CharTec Sales Lab and have the five steps to selling managed services down but what does any of that matter if you can’t even get in front of the prospects? Your sales strategy MUST start with prospecting and filling your sales funnel if you want to have a consistent stream of RRM opportunities.
Luckily for all of you, I happen to be pretty good at playing the prospecting game and I’m here to help! I’ll be sharing some of the sales-life-hacks I have come up with over the years to not only keep my sales funnel full but also continue to tighten the qualification process in which I evaluate my leads. Back in 2009, I was hired into my first sales position with a large executive staffing firm in Silicon Valley. At the time, I had zero experience managing opportunities and the first thing my management requested of me was 140 sales calls a week and 18 face-to-face meetings in order to achieve my weekly goal of 2 new clients.
This may not scream anything to you now and it certainly didn’t to me then but I have to tell you…. that’s not prospecting.
Quantity is useless if there is no quality.
It makes so much more sense to connect with less people and as a result have far more engaged and purposeful conversations, really getting to know WHO you are selling to, building relationships and loyalty within your community. Prospecting is all about researching who YOU want to do business with –> not reaching out to as many people as possibly in hopes that SOMEONE will have SOME SORT OF minimal interest in you at best.
Ok, so that’s all wonderful and fluffy feeling but HOW do we build our lead list without purchasing from a third party, cold calling into random homes and businesses, flooding the airways with SPA advertising, passing out flyers at the parking garage in the mall…. HOW?!
Well, today is your lucky day because I am going to reveal one of the EASIEST and SMARTEST ways to jump start your new warm-lead-generation-lifestyle. I should preface this with assuring you I was never compensated or rewarded for my recommendations and I just think these tools are THAT amazing for the 2018 sales rep’s tool kit. (COMING SOON!)
LinkedIn Sales Navigator + Dux Soup = LEAD GENERATION PERFECTION
LinkedIn is probably a pretty familiar concept to you, especially if you’ve been working on your profile but it’s likely you haven’t heard much about LinkedIn’s social selling service called Sales Navigator. And, it’s probably 99% likely you’ve never heard of the Chrome browser extension, Dux Soup.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
“Sales Navigator allows sales professionals to tap into the power of LinkedIn efficiently. It improves social selling in support of powerful daily habits,” said Diana Kucer, LinkedIn’s Director of Global Product Marketing. When you first launch the tool, a wizard guides you through setup. Based on your existing network, you can pick which organizations are current opportunities. You can import from SalesForce into Sales Navigator to see LinkedIn activity for your accounts.
Sales Navigator goes far beyond a passive system though. Based on the contacts you have selected, Sales Navigator suggests potential organizations that fit a similar profile. You can also define your territory so that suggestions are limited to your area. When I test-drove the system as it was brought to market a few years ago, I was immediately impressed with it’s ability to comprehend my target market based on my preferences and to take it a step further, found it ridiculously useful when it made suggestions to me on companies and professionals that it recommended I try doing business with. Intuitive and brilliant although back then not nearly as capable as it is now.
Dux-Soup
Isn’t that a crazy name? I should look up the purpose of that name sometime… but for now, let’s talk about what it’s capable of. Dux-Soup is the ultimate lead generation tool for LinkedIn. Whether you use the free LinkedIn platform or you subscribe to Sales Navigator, it will literally visit thousands of profiles with one easy click, document everything it’s seeing all the while sending personalized invitations to connect. Taking it one step further, the Chrome extension follows IFTTT trigger workflows and it’s power to operate in a fully automated state elevates a sales person’s productivity from zero to hero before lunch.
To help my members better understand the brilliance I am speaking of, I made a video of the two platforms in action together…. take a look!
I don’t think it could get any easier. If you were to set up this workflow each day to crawl new profiles, you would have a very champagne problem of figuring out how to capitalize on all of the prospects you have with only 24 hours in your day!!! (I’ll have tips for that not-so-bad-crisis soon)
Seriously, MSP world… quit trying to take shotgun approaches to getting your “at bats” with decision makers and look to build long term relationships by listening more, talking less and going the long haul. Prospects that are nurtured and developed over time stick around for renewals and product upgrades. If you don’t know… now you know. 
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