Research a Prospect Online Before an Appointment

When your com­pa­ny receives a request for an esti­mate, there is one very impor­tant step your sales­per­son should take before going out to the prospects home or busi­ness. He (or she) should type their prospec­t’s name into Google and do a lit­tle research. The sales­per­son should dis­cov­er as much as pos­si­ble about his prospect such as: occu­pa­tion, com­pa­ny, hob­bies, con­tri­bu­tions, edu­ca­tion and more. When the sales­per­son arrives at his appoint­ment he will then have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to begin and lead the sales process. A num­ber of years ago, while work­ing at Chism Broth­ers Paint­ing, I researched a new prospects name on Linkedin and Google. I dis­cov­ered that this home­own­er had been the for­mer CEO of sev­er­al well known nation­wide com­pa­nies. I found out a lot of infor­ma­tion about this prospect before ever meet­ing him. I then began to rehearse how the sales appoint­ment would look like. When I met the own­er, I did not men­tion my dis­cov­er­ies until ³⁄₄ of the way through our walk­through of his home. Once I got to know him a bit more, I began to talk about his suc­cess as a busi­ness­man. I’ll nev­er for­get his response when I asked him a few ques­tions about his work at his for­mer com­pa­nies. First he perked up and sound­ed excit­ed to talk about him­self. He then said, ​“How did you know I worked for there?” His wife heard the ques­tion and respond­ed, ​“He prob­a­bly googled you!” After that, he began telling me a lot about run­ning a suc­cess­ful busi­ness and looked at me almost as some­one he could men­tor. I also got the job, which turned into about $100,000 of repaint­ing work. There was such a change in our con­ver­sa­tion after I start­ed talk­ing about him. One final ​“tip” about research­ing a client. Use good judge­ment when talk­ing to a prospect about some of the things you dis­cov­er about them online. Make sure it is the right tim­ing when you bring things up and if it is rel­e­vant. Using the Inter­net can be one of the most pow­er­ful tools you have as a salesperson.