subject: Nine Probing Styles To Generate More Sales Leads [print this page] Like all marketing tasks, performing an appointment setting campaign does have its challenges. Perhaps, on your own, you will not be able to do it right. But that should not be a problem, since you can outsource it to a competent lead generation agency. Still, it is still your job to know more about your business prospects. You may get a lot of B2B leads, but if you fail to fully understand your prospects, then nothing is going to happen. This calls for a little probing work. How to get the best results will depend on how which probing strategy you use. Your communication medium is also important, may it be online marketing channels such as email, search marketing and telemarketing. What are these?
1. Clarification this is usually done when the terms used are too vague, or if you need more details. You can ask your prospects to elaborate on what they meant.
2. Purpose sometimes, the motivations of a prospect is not clear. You need to uncover their underlying motives in order to figure out if they are going to buy or not. An effective lead generation campaign will depend on your ability to make them come out.
3. Relevance there will be a time that your prospect will seem to go off-topic. Gently lead them back to the conversation by asking if what they are talking about is connected to the main topic.
4. Accuracy sometimes, what your prospects say may not jive with the information you got from other sources. You need to verify the completeness of facts, since you will need that in the crafting of your business solution.
5. Repetition there are cases that asking the same question again (with emphasis on the on the area you want more detail) will reveal more facts than if you asked another kind of question. You can use the exact words or maybe rephrase them in order to elicit a better response.
6. Examples if you are talking to business prospects that are in an industry you are not familiar with, asking them for examples will do the trick. This is also useful in testing how much they know about their own business. They can be potential B2B leads if you can provide them a solution to their unperceived problems.
7. Extension when a business prospect gave you insufficient information, you can politely ask them to provide you with more. Encourage them to open up so that you can learn more about their situation (and how you can best help them).
8. Evaluation you can use this tact if they are using a competitors product. This can help you determine how judgmental they are, as well as figure out if you can do better.
9. Emotional if your prospects talk more in the third person, or if they are generally emotional, ask them how they personally feel. Just a word of caution: you might step on a landmine and make them explode their pent-up feelings.
Properly probing your prospects is an excellent way to generate better and qualified sales leads. After all, if you know more about what they need, you can better help them.
