Whether it’s for research, cold calling to collect information, competitive intelligence or win loss analysis, when you instigate a telephone call you are in the sales mode. You want information. This blog lists 18 tippers to improve your telephone collection skills.
While many people ask me to share the templates I have prepared over the years, when I conduct win loss interviews, actually it’s the upfront planning that matters more. If you don’t have all the salient facts around the sales situation or a good value proposition as to why the customer or prospect will want to talk to you, you’ll never get that communication off the ground!
Here are a few takeaways from today’s AIIP webinar, “Going Local: Techniques & Strategies for Finding
Local Business Information,” presented by Marcy Phelps, CEO of Phelps Research and author of recently published “Research on Main Street.” This includes many valuable links to sources for local US sources, and how to buy “Research on Main Street.” If you’re an Independent running a research, private eye, library or competitive intelligence practice, AIIP is the place to get invaluable advice and resources to help you start and run your business successfully!
The Competitive Intelligence Division (CID) of Special Libraries Association (SLA) has a great line-up of presentations and fun events at this year’s annual conference in Philadelphia from June 12-15. In the spirit of cooperative intelligence, I have listed the competitive intelligence (CI) events below in chronological order by date with book signings at the end. Look under Twitter #slacid for Tweets!
Research on Main Street is a must read for anyone seeking the right local information to make strategic decisions. Follow the advice in this book by author Marcy Phelps to boost your knowledge about local and regional events that may trigger change, such as a major layoff, a change in leadership, deregulation, new regulation or a technical breakthrough. The blend of case studies and expert interviews breathe life into the dry business of information gathering and analysis to support specific local strategic business initiatives.
Many competitive intelligence, marketing, research and product developers complain about poor communication from their sales force, who has a direct conduit to your customers—one of the best sources of knowledge about what your company is doing right and wrong as well as ideas for new products, services and tweaks to your existing products that can be revenue generating!
So how do you encourage cooperative communication from Sales?
How often do we get stuck in patterns and either make mistakes or don’t see events coming? In competitive intelligence, we look for what isn’t or what looks odd or out of place since oddity often is a precursor to change. There is always surprise in life and business. How we prepare ourselves for it is what separates the excellent from the average. I find I react better to surprises if I get out of my comfort zone more often.
Read about 10 top tips recommended by Arthur Weiss of Aware shared in a recent AIIP webinar. These will help you no matter what type of research you do. Aside from sharing some great websites, browsers, social networks and Internet people sites, I like Arthur’s framing of research. Learn exactly what you are looking for and put yourself in the target company’s place as plan for and conduct the research. Also think laterally. Look for oddities and things that don’t look, feel or sound right.
How do you assess the reliability of your human sources? I consider their motivation to know what you’re trying to learn as a primary yardstick towards reliability, although people don’t always tell the truth or in the spirit of trying to be helpful when they don’t know…they unintentionally misinform. What’s been your experience?
Recently, I wrote about the Extreme Presentation format for presenting material to smaller audiences. At the conclusion of that post, I gave an example of how Extreme Presentation looks. This post describes and illustrates an example of Extreme Presentation by defining what and how to use cooperative intelligence in competitive intelligence or research.