Close Deals Faster – RESEARCH

This is the second blog post of 10 in a series based on my new book, Close Deals Faster: The 15 Shortcuts of the Asher Sales Method.The first dealt with the subject of FOCUS, or the fact that the top salespeople focus on a few prospects rather than spray and pray. This allows them to close deals faster than the average salespeople.

Chapter Two: “Thoroughly Research Prospects and Their Organizations Prior to First Contact,” stresses in this new world we live in, with so much information at our fingertips thanks to mobile devices, there is no excuse to contact a prospect without thoroughly researching them first.

In fact, not researching can turn buyers completely off – especially if you ask questions and the answers are readily available on a company website, press releases, or social media. You are literally wasting the buyer’s time!

To close deals faster, discover the answers to the following at minimum:

• Company history (years in business, major wins and challenges)
• Bios of their leadership
• Annual revenue, size of workforce, and geographic footprint
• Notable customers/major accounts
• What are the most pressing challenges in their industry?
• Which issues are confusing or troubling their customers?
• How are industry leaders confronting these issues and problems?
• What solutions have been proposed by competitors and industry experts?
• How do your products and services address their problems?
• Who are their major competitors?
• What solutions are their competitors proposing to meet industry challenges?
• What are the strengths/weaknesses of the prospect’s products and services versus their competitors?
• How are your prospect’s offerings positioned in their marketplace?
• How successful is your prospect at differentiating their company?

Armed with this information (and more, the above is just for starters), you will close deals faster because you will impress the buyer, earn their trust, and get them to open up to you. It will also allow you to filter out those companies which are not worth pursuing.

Act like you are already part of the buyer’s business by challenging them to expand or otherwise break out of whatever “box” they are stuck in. Be a trusted adviser who is willing to disrupt the buyer’s view of the future and open them up to possibilities they might not have considered before. In order to do this, you must know the company quite well, and that is why I urge you to research in order to close deals faster.

Some valuable information gathering tools apart from the obvious Google, LinkedIn, Bloomberg, etc. are:

• Doximity for doctors and physicians
• RallyPoint for veterans and active members of the military
• ResearchGate for academics
• Spiceworks for information technology professionals
• GitHub for software engineers
• GrabCad for mechanical engineers
• Kaggle for data scientists and statisticians

I hope the above becomes a resource for you from this point forward. For even more free resources to help you close deals faster, visit https://www.asherstrategies.com/resources.

For a deeper look at the subject of researching buyers before the first contact, please order my book Close Deals Faster: The 15 Shortcuts of the Asher Sales Method which is published by Idea Press and available on Amazon.