With the use of Sales 2.0 in more B2B sales organizations, it is important to move past cold calling prospects. Search, social networks and B2B blogs are all providing sales information to prospects 24 hours a day. Using the audience insight gathered from these resources gives the sale professional an edge – they know more about the persona and needs of the prospect allowing them to move past blind calling.

In order to increase sales revenues, it’s time to evolve past cold calling prospects. How do you evolve past cold calling prospects? Here are four ways to get you started:

  1. Follow-up with visitors – Anonymous visitors to your website are not lost when they leave your site. With the right anonymous web analysis solution, those anonymous visitors to your site are tracked. Based on that information, you can find out their company and the right person for the targeted account – this leads into a call to the right person and a possible qualified lead.
  2. Ask – Not every prospect wants to talk – even if they show up as a qualified lead. A simple, yet easy thing to do is ask. Ask them when would a good time be to call and discuss your products and services. Usually these types of leads may go back to marketing for more lead nurturing or the sales person may want to keep that lead accessible for future contact.
  3. Working with marketing – When sales and marketing become aligned, they share responsibilities, plans, goals and information. This alignment is key to optimal sales teams as well as utilizing such things as social selling to get past cold calling and relying on information already available through a reliable marketing automation solution.
  4. Research – With tools available like social networks, CRM and others, B2B sales personnel have the ability to research and connect with prospects in new ways. More and more sales organizations are using Sales 2.0 to bypass cold calling and bring in information from social networks such as LinkedIn and bringing that information into CRM for analysis.

The B2B buyer today is more knowledgeable and understands more about their potential purchase than previous generations. This requires sales personnel to become better informed and knowledgeable – this is Sales 2.0. Part of this includes moving past cold calling prospects when there is no lead scoring or lead nurturing.

By moving into the next wave of B2B sales strategies, sales teams are converting more prospects and generating more revenue for the company – all without cold calling.

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