Sales Prospecting Techniques - How to Use Google to Never Have to Get Past the Gatekeeper Again

How is your sales prospecting success?

One of the applications of the Internet that really excites me more than most for sales prospecting, is the ability to get direct contact numbers for almost anyone you want contact with. Historically, appointment setting training and material has largely focused on:

Getting past the gatekeeper
Overcoming the gatekeeper
Tricking the gatekeeper
Bypassing the gatekeeper
And sometimes befriending the gatekeeper

With some sales guile, some knowledge of the internet and some ingenuity it is possible to find the contact details of most of your prospects without ever needing to get stuck on the gate keeper.

Let me introduce you to your best sales prospecting tool: Google Search!

To help clarify the terminology I have put search terms in [brackets] but these are not needed as part of the search. Understand that:

["question marks will get you precise phrases in the question marks"] so HR director [HR director site:bbc.co.uk] will only give the instances of the words 'HR DIRECTOR' mentioned on the BBC web site. Think of the power of using this to research your target market. For example a quick search on [president site:ibm.com ] soon provides hundreds of pages of references to Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents of Technology, sales, marketing operations.... For us UK people we use the term Director.

These are just the first steps in learning your new best prospecting tool. When you feel the time is right to know more, then venture out on your own and find out what other little search tricks there are out there for you.

So, how can you get the direct dial number of the person you want to speak to every time without worrying about gatekeepers or no name policies?

Check Their Company Web Site:

I know this sounds crazily easy but half the time it is. If you know the name of the person you want to speak to then spend a couple of minutes looking on their website or doing a

site:their web site search

It is becoming increasingly popular to have the telephone numbers listed somewhere on the site.

This gets me and my clients the direct dial number roughly 60% of the time. It may not always come from the 'About Us' either. Unless told to do so, the search engines will keep a record of every page and every document on a web page. We have found direct dial telephone numbers listed on a web site in all manner of easy to find places, such as:

An internal telephone directory hosted on the same web server as the website
A staff newsletter
A news bulletin to suppliers
Press Releases
Notes from presentations, keynote speeches and PowerPoint slides.

If you don't know the direct name of the person then you can search by their job function i.e "HR Director BBC" and as we saw earlier this can have an immediate and targeted response.

Use the principles as given above but in the big wide world of the internet, and I would be amazed if you do not find a direct telephone number reference. If you don't know the name, then remember your search knowledge and search for what you need.

What you might find is the person has their name listed on any number of social networking or business databases such as linkedin or zoominfo.