This blog is proud to say that the phrase "SBR " which stands for 'Selling by Research"was first coined here and the SBR techniques which have been lightly touched here is ORIGINAL to this blog. The idea first germinated here in the form of the written word.
Many Sales/Business Development Managers/General Managers/even VP's think that the more prospects, a salesperson visits, the better. Never mind, if it lays emphasis on quantity rather than quality. The Manager has the data to justify his sales forecasts for the next quarter. And at the month end, when the CEO is surprised to see that the sales person has visited the highest number of potential customers but has flopped in actual selling, the same manager will tell him “there is something wrong here, you lack application, you lack communication skills” the newbie can hardly say that the strategy was devised by the manager himself. "Gee!! that’s not fair" you may say but trust me, these kinds of managers do exist and they are in the majority.
In industrial plants and manufacturing organizations, decision makers have no time to entertain sales-people on fishing expeditions. In Industrial Marketing, which comprises of selling of high or medium value systems, “cold-calls” can backfire on you. Before the net, cold calls were a must. Information is power.Cold calling in industrial marketing was done for collection of market information. Having information gave a party an immense advantage over its competitors. Today, the internet can help your sales-people to collect all information about prospects, making cold-calls redundant.
" We live today in tumultuous times. In the future, people will think us as the most lucky people for never before has a generation witnessed such sweeping technical and socioeconomic changes within such a short time. If you want to survive, you need to adapt, to change with the times unless you want to be extinct. "
The Internet as an Information Source
How do you collect information from the internet? Check websites of service providers usually involved in projects. A few website types, where information is available free are as below. (This is only a partial list and you can find many more classes if you are interested)
(1)B2B trading portals and Business Directories: These contain all information and all you have to do is collection and compiling.
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| Screen Shot of site. Look at the projects link at the lower right |
(An example is http://www.processregister.com which has a section on projects, which gives the location, value, status and the promoter. The website even has the projects classified sector wise. What else do you need?)
Different types of projects classified typewise
Different types of projects classified typewise
(2) Job Portals: These give out information in the form of “Project Managers required for…” or “We require for our new project…”
(3) Websites of Consultants: Consultants often give out details of new consulting jobs they are working on, or have bagged.
If you think that you will get full details of a project from tapping into the above or similar resources, you will be disappointed. What you will get is “leads”. You will get all your detail information then by doing some web research on these leads.
