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The Hard Truth About Cold-Calling from Yesware’s Matthew Bellows

Matthew BellowsAs a small startup, attempting to target and sell to a big company may seem daunting at first. It’s perfectly natural for “Where do I even start?!” to kick in. Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware, is ready to ease your fears, with precise insight into how to take your first steps. Cold calling, identifying a champion, and the big meeting are just a sneak peak into the topics he cover during Tuesday night’s Startup Selling to Big Companies at Intelligent.ly. We sat down with Matthew to learn a little more before the big night.

What is the biggest challenge that a startup faces when targeting a big company with their product?

It’s hard to narrow it down to just one challenge, but the most important one to overcome is finding a genuine champion to lead the internal conversations within the big company. Without finding that person, it’s just not possible to close a deal. I’ll talk about the process for finding and building a relationship with your champion during my class.

 What is the importance of cold calling?

Cold calling has three important benefits:

1) There’s absolutely nothing better for honing your 30-second pitch and getting a genuine conversation going.

2) It’s often the only way to get in front of older decision makers who don’t deal with email well.

3) Almost all sales teams want a majority of their younger salespeople making dozens of cold calls a day – so you just have to get good at it.

How has Yesware helped you hone your sales process? Can you provide any real-life examples?

Two major ways: the template libraries help me respond much more quickly and accurately to prospects, and email tracking gives me incredible insights into how people are responding to my emails. But I’m the only one on Yesware’s sales team – bigger teams have several more features that help with CRM syncing and collaboration.

The real-life example I hear about the most from salespeople is, “Yesware told me this prospect just opened my email, so I gave him a call right away. ‘I was just thinking about you!’ he said and I got the deal closed.” I love hearing those stories.

If you could be an expert in one skill by tomorrow, what would it be?

Synchronizing my body and mind. I’m not sure we’ll get to that in the class, but we can talk about it afterwards if anyone wants.

 

from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/the-hard-truth-about-cold-calling-from-yeswares-...