Plan Your Approach

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Define what a contact strategy is.
List the three account tiers that most sales teams use.
Describe how to develop messages for different roles.

Create Your Contact Strategy

If you completed the Prospecting to Improve Sales module, you learned the value of strategic prospecting. And if it isn’t yet clear that there is a craft to prospecting, let’s say it again: There is. And it’s not just about blasting off emails and making phone calls to your prospects. You’re about to learn the discipline that the world’s top sales professionals have followed to bring in billions of dollars of revenue.

The first step of strategic prospecting is to develop a contact strategy. A contact strategy involves:

Identifying your most likely prospects.
Crafting messages with email and voicemail to share with those prospects.
Using a trigger event to connect with the prospects at the right time
Preparing for their response

Place Your Accounts into Three Pools

As a sales professional, you probably have a territory and list of accounts to sell to. As you know, not all accounts are created equal. Based on certain characteristics, some accounts are more likely to become customers than others. This can be based on their size, industry, the technology that they are currently using, and loads of other factors.

If you don’t know what these characteristics are for your area, talk to your manager and peers to get clarity. Once you are clear, organize your accounts into three pools.

Tier 1 accounts—Most likely to buy
Tier 2 accounts—Might buy
Tier 3 accounts—Unlikely to buy

Sales development teams typically use three tiers, and account executives typically use four tiers. However, the idea is pretty much the same. So, for the sake of simplicity, we use three tiers here.

Let’s look at how to approach each of these accounts.

Tier 1 Accounts

These are the people who are most likely to buy. All the strategic prospecting techniques we cover later in this module–such as creating multiple messages and trigger events–are proven to work with this tier. Great prospecting takes time, and it’s time well spent when you are trying to reach this group.

Tier 2 Accounts

People at these companies are likely to buy, but it doesn’t make sense to invest the same level of personal attention. To reach people in this group, you can develop an email or voicemail template that allows you to spend 2 hours to reach out to 50 people. However, you’re not sending a mass email: That’s marketing’s job. For these people, you’re just casting a little wider net.

Tier 3 Accounts

These accounts are perfect for practicing. As you develop new sales pitches, call your tier 3 accounts first and practice. It’s fine if you trip up or get tongue-tied with these accounts since they’re unlikely to purchase.

However, you should qualify your accounts every time you make a call. For example, if you call a tier 3 account and get the assistant, before you get put into voicemail, ask a question like, “Would you mind telling me what XYZ product you use?” With the information you learn, you can potentially realize that your tier 3 account is really a tier 1, or your tier 2 account is really a tier 3. The more you know about your accounts, the more effective you can be at focusing your efforts.

Create Your Message

Now that you know the companies that you are going to approach, it’s time to focus on the people within those companies who you want to target. Develop multiple attention-grabbing statements, phrases that include the benefits you offer your customers, for the different roles you want to approach. Here are some example statements.

For the finance leader—We show CFOs how to effectively manage growth by improving forecast accuracy by 60%.
For the marketing leader—We help companies use 40%–50% of unused data to create closer relationships with their customers.
For customer service—We show companies how to drive down support cases by 40% by using our self–service portal and allowing service reps to focus on key cases.
For prospects in the financial industry—Our customers in the financial industry tell us they see a 40% increase in revenue by having a 360-degree view of their customers, opening up new cross-selling opportunities.

Keep your list of generic messages nearby to help you compose your emails and voicemails to specific prospects.

Executives prefer quantifiable numbers and case studies over general benefit statements. So when you reach out to them, instead of telling them, “This solution has an ROI of 53%,” explain how long it will take until they see that ROI, and share a case study. Is that within three weeks? Three months? Who had that success? Talk like you’re reading off an Excel spreadsheet, share real-life examples, and you’ll be an executive’s best friend.

Earn the Right to Make Contact

The next part of strategic prospecting is identifying the right time to reach out to your prospect so they welcome your email and voicemail. You earn the right to reach out to someone by doing a little research and finding something interesting and relevant to create a connection.

The internet is full of information, and makes it easier than ever to make meaningful and relevant connections with prospective clients. Here are some places to find opportunities to connect with your prospect.

Look at	Find	Connect	Connect
Company’s website	Information on the “about us” page or in news and events page	Connect their stories with your value propositions.	When reading your press release, I noticed your focus for this year is to reach your customers on mobile devices.
Social channels	Quotes, particularly from executives	Connect their updates with your value propositions.	I saw your Twitter post that mentioned your improvements in employee productivity.

Don’t go overboard in trying to find a connection. Five minutes of research should be enough to find something that shows your prospects you understand their interests.

Use the News

You don’t want the prospect to feel like you are contacting them out of the blue. So include a “trigger event” in your message. A trigger event is a piece of news that explains why you are contacting the prospect right now. With practice, you can identify tons of trigger events to help you compose relevant emails and voicemail messages. After presenting the trigger event, ask the client a focused question to start the conversation. You can find trigger events that relate to the prospect’s industry, company, or role. Here are some sample trigger events to get you started.

Area of News	Trigger Event	You might say...	...and ask
Industry	Gartner reports or articles on emerging trends	Price Waterhouse Cooper recently reported that consumer’s buying habits are becoming more segmented.	How are you addressing new customer buying habits?
Company	New products, opening or closing offices, awards, budget cuts, mergers, and promotions	I noticed your company has a net promoter score of 72%. That’s great.	What activities are you doing to keep and raise your net promoter score even higher?
Role	Reports about increased pressure on time, responsibilities, or other changes	Gartner reports that 69% of CIOs think risk management is not keeping up with changes in IT.	What is your risk management strategy?

Now that you have your contact strategy and can identify trigger events, it’s time to tie it all together in the next unit.

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