Craig Klein left a comment on my blog this morning. I checked out his blog and saw a great post that I had to point people to. Here's an excerpt from the full article:

 Bottom line: Recent experiences like this one show me that too many sales people still haven't gotten the message - sales is not about talking, telling or teaching. Its about listening.

Your goal is to continue to ask the prospect questions about their world. Understand what's working for them, what challenges they face, where they think they're heading and most importantly, what are the greatest risks they see in the current world or in the future. What are they afraid of.

Why? Because people buy for emotional reasons. Especially in business, people buy things because its a piece of a vision in their head or they buy because they're afraid of something. Either way, if you know what that is, then its easy to show them how your product or service can be a crucial part of the vision or protect them from failure, cost overruns, etc.

If part of your job involves initiating conversations with prospects, you need to read this email chain that Dave Kurlan has shared between him and a prospect:

Lesson - Even if you fail to get a response or you get a negative response, keep at it! The key is to get a response - to something - to get a dialog started.

Dave's example is about contacting a referral. However, the same principles apply for following up on web generated leads. Do what you need to do to just start "any" conversation.

With referrals, I usually keep at it until I figure out whether I can help the prospect. However, with leads, it is two strikes and their out. Dave's example makes me think that I'm not doing enough before I abandon that lead. The main reason I don't is because I'm looking for low hanging fruit in a humungous orchard. In plain english, I have more leads than time.

Anyone have this problem? How do you make sure you do the things necessary to get people into conversation with you?