I don’t know about you, but I think the days are gone when you can just call up a company and request a meeting with the Managing Director.
We get at least 10 sales calls a day, so I can only imagine how many the MD of Co-op gets. I’m guessing hundreds. Luckily, he’ll have a very good team around him that will be experts at fielding these calls – so I bet he never has a single one put through to him.
How, then, did we get a meeting with the MD of Co-op?
Let’s face it, he’s a very busy man. He’s the head of a huge supermarket chain and I would imagine his day is packed from very early in the morning probably until the wee hours of the night. There’s no way he’s going to say yes to a meeting unless it’s something that he’s thinking about right now.
That means we needed to tie our client’s offering with something that’s likely to be on his to-do list. Here are the top five things I reckon are on there:
1. Cash flow, finances and profits
2. More clients and looking after current clients
3. Growing the business
4. Recruiting his team and looking after his team
5. Other people’s stuff
Let me just explain that last one. By ‘other people’s stuff’ I mean if other people start shouting and jumping up and down about something, particularly if it’s someone he pays attention to, and they do this enough, it probably becomes higher priority on his list to deal with.
In our case, our client’s business could be related to at least three things on this list; cash flow, finances and profit, growing the business, and more clients and looking after current clients.
So, what we did was to reach out to him on LinkedIn and he accepted our connection request – so far, so good! We then composed a follow-up email that related to the things we knew were on his to-do list and asked him whether he’d like to have a conversation. He came back and said yes. We sent him over some dates to do this and he replied confirming the appointment. Job done!
Just shows you the power of both using LinkedIn and following up. Even if he hadn’t replied, we would have been able to reach him by phone as the call would have been much warmer and we would have gained more of his contact details through our connection on LinkedIn.
We’ve recently booked meetings with Travis Perkins, Edinburgh Council (quite a few councils actually), Dignity Funeral Homes, Bernard Matthews and Primark, to name but a few.
If you’re interested in getting these sorts of results for your business, let’s set up some time to talk. Simply call us on 01386 298 042 or click here to book a convenient time in our diary:
