{"id":4680,"date":"2018-04-13T12:09:15","date_gmt":"2018-04-13T11:09:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/?p=4680"},"modified":"2025-01-21T10:26:09","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T09:26:09","slug":"selling-techniques","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodpecker.co\/blog\/selling-techniques\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Apply Selling Techniques to Cold Email Prospecting"},"content":{"rendered":"

List building is the outreach phase when we should learn as much as we can about our prospects so that we know what to put in our cold email copy. But what if we don’t know what type of information to look for besides simple facts, such as company name, size, the number of employees, etc.? How to structure the research process to squeeze out the most of it?<\/p>\n

Well… we can turn to traditional sales techniques that teach beginning sales reps the ways to approach a potential customer. Basically, those methods feature a list of interview questions one should ask the prospect to persuade them to buy. But what if we could use some of those questions during list building?<\/p>\n

You may be skeptical about using those methods. For starters, they were developed in order to establish a meaningful dialogue with the prospect on the spot. Cold email prospecting, on the other hand, is a process that\u00a0can’t be handled on the go. It takes way much time. You don’t interview your prospect directly but dig through the\u00a0well of information you find online. That can be a company website, social media profiles, review sites or YouTube videos. However,\u00a0having the right questions in mind, you know what to look for.<\/p>\n

We could accomplish three things. It would help us make certain that the company we’re targeting is a good fit<\/a>, personalize the copy and follow-ups<\/a> and lastly, we would know how to approach the prospect after you receive a positive reply.<\/p>\n

What selling techniques\u00a0can we use for prospecting?<\/h2>\n

I’d like to tackle two selling techniques that can ease the prospecting phase for you. I’m sure you’ve heard about them. They are rather popular when one looks for guidebooks about sales.<\/p>\n

SPIN selling method<\/h3>\n

The first sales method is a SPIN strategy developed by Neil Rackham in the late 80s.<\/p>\n\"spin-selling-book-cover\"\nSPIN selling focuses on high-value sales. In such sales, the buying process is longer than usual. It is so also for cold emailing. SPIN is an acronym. Every letter represents a different category of questions. ‘S’ stands for Situation, ‘P’ for Problem, ‘I’ for Implication and ‘N’ for Need-Payoff.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, a sales rep, instead of singing praises about the offering, asks many questions and attentively listens to the answers their prospective buyers give. In the prospecting process though, we won’t be asking our prospects any questions. We will use the questions as a guide\u00a0as to what kind of information we\u00a0would like to find online.<\/p>\n

The Sandler rules<\/h3>\n

The other sales method is Sandler’s selling system. Although it wasn’t written with a cold email in mind, we can distill some lessons about reaching out to prospects via email too. Similarly to SPIN selling methodology, it focuses on\u00a0asking a prospective buyer a bunch of questions to see if they’re a good\u00a0fit in place of pitching your\u00a0solution to them.<\/p>\n\"book-cover-sandler-rules-of-sales\"\n

David Sandler developed his selling technique in 1967 and it has been taught around the world ever since. I will describe Sandler’s selling methodology based on the book “49 Timeless Selling Principles… and How to Apply Them. The Sandler Rules”\u00a0adapted by David Mattson.<\/p>\n

This method teaches salespeople to ask such a kind of questions which would qualify the prospects immediately. But it mostly focuses on listening to the prospects. For that reason, some jokingly say that it’s a method of selling that makes a prospect sell\u00a0your solution to themselves.<\/p>\n

In Sandler’s method of selling, you ask, “How long has X been an issue for you?” or “What have you tried to do to fix X?”.<\/p>\n

The mentioned book also gives out 49 rules mentioned in the title that focuses on showing a prospect how to approach each sale and what to learn from it — all enriched with\u00a0possible scenarios of a conversation between a sales rep and an interested buyer.<\/p>\n

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