A simple and easy way to qualify and rank prospects

About ten years ago, a company in the behavioral survey research market, needed help developing their virtual sales and marketing strategy. They were new to the market and required an “evangelical sale”, as prospective clients would need to take a leap of faith because the company and solution were new to the market. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll define evangelizing as noted in Dictionary.com: “advocating a cause with the object of making converts“. Converting prospects to clients is a similar challenge for many types of businesses, be they technology companies, financial organizations or insurance agencies. Targeting new niches adds an additional layer of complexity.

The first step for my client, was to identify the target market and build a suspect list. The CEO had an insurance background and landed a few insurance company clients. We decided this would be the first niche market to target, a niche that would be reasonably easy to define. How did you build a comprehensive suspect list? We utilized several top 100 industry lists and imported them into a simple Microsoft database (we could have used a reputable list vendor for this exercise). We then, we called every one of these insurance organizations (there were about 300 initially targeted). These targeted cold calls resulted in up-to-date contact information, key executives, titles, direct phone numbers, and additional emails.

The Call To Action was an opportunity to attend educational/informational Web Seminars. Within a few short months, the database was quite comprehensive, and the suspect list began to yield a compelling prospect list. We used the Prospect Scorecard system to identify and qualify likely buyers. The group webinars helped drive prospects through the sales pipeline, as interested prospects moved to one-to-one web meetings. Out of the 300 initial suspects targeted, over 150 reviewed the solution in the first 12 months, and about 20 percent of them purchased within that same year. An impressive result for a self-funded, emerging operation selling 99 percent virtually, without travel or face-to-face meetings and the costs and inefficiencies associated with that model. Today, many years after we helped this client create a target suspect list, they continue to dominate their niche. The same methodology, techniques and tools that worked for this technology company can work for an insurance agency, broker, financial  company or almost any B2B oriented organization. For more information or territory exclusive lead generation programs and insurance agency leads, visit StartUpSelling.