Before cold calling, know your perspective customers

Pre-sales or Business development requires significant industry knowledge. As a pre-sales consultant how will you identify a lead, or an organization who might be interested in your services or products? The tried and tested way is to know more about your perspective customers.

Client’s business issues:

In any given time, each organization faces some critical business issues. Those issues are known as Porter 5 forces e.g., increase competition for rival firms, world economic situation, internal financial problems, talent crunches, technological issues etc.

Initiative:

Each business issues will enables firms to take an initiative to mitigate it in order to sustain in the competitive business environment.

For example, take Vodafone’s entry into India. Vodafone was bleeding due to the stagnant European market. That was Vodafone’s business issue. And the “initiative” was to explore emerging markets.

Goals:

Initiative will be linked to goals. Goals are set when organization feels that there is a gap between what they are and what they want to be.

Strategy:

Strategies are developed in order to achieve a goal. e.g., strategies to fund the project, strategies to recruit, strategies to increase brand awareness etc. For Vodafone, strategy was merger and acquisition of an existing telecom operator Hutch.

For sales guys it is vital to know these factors before start cold calling. These are basics information that may lead to a successful sale. Organization publishes Shareholders letters, analysts report in each quarter. These reports identify what are the organizations priorities and how organization will make strategic actions on that. It’s important to go through these reports to identify client’s issues, initiatives, goals and strategy.

In short it is vital to know what your perspective customers want and how you can help in each stages of his decision process. After all pre-sales is not all about closing the deals, it’s about helping your customers make profitable decision in each stages of his/her buying cycles

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