Imagine you’re a business development rep. You need to make about 70 calls today to get the three leads you need to feel okay about where you are with your quota this month. You better get busy prospecting. You have a list of names in your CRM system. It’s time to start smiling and dialing – it’s a numbers game, after all, right? Well, not so fast. What if there was a way to work smarter, rather than harder?

Make cold calls less…cold

What if you didn’t have to try so hard to explain to an admin (or voicemail system) why you should be put through (or have your call returned)? What if when you actually catch your target prospect on the phone, you didn’t get brushed off quickly because you have

a) Asked, “Is now a bad time?” (That’s one way to get an easy yes.)
b) Launched into your elevator speech without being asked, which means you’ll likely not realize that your prospect has hung up before you’ve even taken a breath.

Imagine if you already knew a few things about your prospect before you even picked up the phone? I’m not talking about the types of things you can look up online because you’ll still be working pretty hard to get a foot in the door even if you know someone’s title or company size from checking out their LinkedIn or company website.

Well, if you’re following up on one of SimplyDIRECT’s prospecting surveys, the door is wide open. The prospect is already warmed up and feels as though you’re speaking their language because SimplyDIRECT invests the time prior to launching a survey to ensure that the questions and answer choices presented are relevant to the target audience.

Don’t skip contact discovery

But before we even launch a survey, we need to perform a few other essential steps. In order to determine the right candidates to send the survey to, we can either perform a database cleansing exercise (with a set of target accounts our client has provided) or work on new contact discovery (to deliver a custom-researched list of names). If we are using the database cleansing method, we perform online research and actually call into each account to ensure the record is current, e.g., correct title, email and address verification. A custom-researched contact list is built to the title or the role our client specifies and we have the ability to find key decision makers for specific functions. Database cleansing should be a priority because it’s the cornerstone of any successful prospecting survey campaign. We can also enrich the database with intent data – either the client’s own (webinar attendees, tradeshow visitors, etc.) or 3rd party data (from social sites like LinkedIn).

A successful prospecting survey increases sales productivity

Using prospecting surveys with your target audience means you will have engaging and meaningful conversations with your company’s target audience, based on the responses to the survey questions. The sales cycle will be shortened because you’ve got a head start: you know how to position your offering and you can take a personalized approach with each prospect. Survey research provides a stunning advantage: you’ve now got everything you need to construct a pitch tailored to the prospect’s unique situation. Best of all, our surveys are designed so that when the respondents submit their answers, they’ve given the you the most important advantage of all: their personal permission to contact them.

But remember, it all starts with clean data. If you would like to try out our contact discovery process, click here to get 25 human-verified contacts for free!