Hello again! Lesson number 7 of the warm calling course focuses on validating your leads part 2. So, we’ve already gone over a number of methods that I use to validate some of my potential new customers, but it’s important to ensure we use all of the tools available to us. So, during this lesson, we will focus on a number of other techniques I use to validate my leads.

The first one being, compare their products to other customers. If you have identified a potential new customer and their product range is similar to an existing customer, the chances are that their business model, their requirements, will be identical to your existing customer. This means we can compare them and see where we believe we can add value, but more importantly, if they will fit with our target audience.

The second is to use your network to find links. If a customer contact previously worked at one of your potential leads, asked them about the business, use them to find out information about what is important to them, what is good, are they a good fit for NCAB, and whether they match our target audience. This can save a lot of time by relying on some of the strong relationships you’ve already built.

To build on this, we can check social media platforms. Again, with LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, we can quickly go on and try and identify who our customers are by seeing who’s liking their post, see what they’re sharing, as this will identify what’s important to them, and find out how active they are on social media platforms. This can often identify whether they’re a forward-thinking organization, whether they’re looking to expand, or whether they’re targeting a particularly new market or product range.

And last, but not least, ask your customers – who are their competitors? Who are causing them problems? And the reason we say this is because we went into a customer in the UK and asked this exact question, and they were quite open and honest and said there was a new contract manufacturer to enter the market. They were very competitive on a high HDI pricing, but their quality was atrocious. What this has done is this has identified a potential new customer, and already you’ve identified a need. They have a need for high quality HDI product, and this means that your customers are helping you validate leads.

And when we compare the information we found during the validation process 1 and this process, we can confidently say that we’ve identified a need and can offer a solution to every single potential new customer on your sales funnel. And this ensures that we can approach the warm calling process in a much more positive manner, and more importantly be confident that we are warm calling instead of cold calling.