Pre-Sales Call Research With Del.icio.us
Written by Jan Visser on October 1, 2007. Leave a Comment on this Post.
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In our introduction, we spoke about the need for solid pre-call research. Here’s the first of a number of sales tools that can make saving and organizing your prospecting research far more effective and available: Del.icio.us.
Most people have at least heard of this online service, recently bought out by Yahoo. It’s a very simple idea: install the small browser add-on, find web pages you like, and rather than bookmark them within your browser, tag-and-bookmark them using http://del.icio.us instead.
To “tag” a web page simply means you assign keywords that you can use to find similar items. The bookmarks can also be shared (anyone can see your bookmarks) or private (only you can see them). It’s an idea called “social bookmarking,” and you can read more about the concept here: http://del.icio.us/about/. Details on how to save your bookmarks using the service can be found here.
Can you already begin figure out how Del.icio.us can be used easily for your pre-call planning? As you browse the web conducting your company or contact research, simply click the Tag button in your browser to save relevant pages you find. You can add a description, notes, and tags to the page before saving it. This beats printing out endless, poorly formatted web pages.
After doing all this, when you’re ready to study the information you’ve found before your appointment, you simply go to your personal Del.icio.us page, select the tag you used to compile research on the company or person, and all of the links along with your notes are all right there.
An Example
I’ve created a sample page for a hypothetical salesperson who has, or wants to set, an appointment with Alain Crozier, Corporate Vice President and a CFO for Microsoft (chosen at random). See the results here: http://del.icio.us/salesdemo/alaincrozier.
In this example, I spent little time searching information on him, but you can see the simplicity and power of using Del.icio.us to keep all of your pre-call research in one spot. I kept the bookmarks public to let you see how to use the tool, but any of those links could have been kept private for my access only.
Good luck incorporating Del.icio.us as a great, free, online tool for compiling research prior to sales calls!
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