Zach Selch hires low-cost researchers at $40-$60 an hour to gather prospect intel like personal needs and LinkedIn connections, letting him book meetings without cold calling. He also uses ongoing market and competitor data to shape strategy and find high-potential customers.
Chapters
I use a lot of business intelligence that I outsource, both tactical and strategic. Tactically, what I'm doing is I want to find out things like information about people I'm dealing with, what their needs are, anything I can find out about their business before I meet with them. I'm going to investigate, and I found why should I spend my time on it when I can hire Somebody who's much better at it than I am to do it for about $40 to $60 an hour. Strategically, I'll pull together all sorts of information about market, about my competition, etc. So I'm going to pull together typically, really on an ongoing basis, information about every market I'm dealing with. Some of it's very easy to find information. It just saves me time not doing it myself. I'll pull together information about the demographics and about the economy, that kind of thing. I'll pull together information about the customers that I'm meeting, the end users that I'm dealing with. I want to know stuff about them which might help me build more rapport with them, but I also want to know more importantly about their problems, what might be things they're looking to solve. I'm also going to do things like pull together information about Just in terms of really any type of information that I can get that's going to help me do business more smoothly. If I can hire somebody to pull that together and pay them on an hourly basis, that'll be very helpful. And I do this on an ongoing basis with my customers, with the markets I deal with, with my competition. It's very helpful strategically. There's a lot of stuff I want to know about different I want to know things like— I want to know their demographics, I want to know their economics, those type of things. But also there are specific things that might have to do with my product. Are they buying certain things that would indicate to me that they are good customers or good potential customers? Those type of things. Thank you very much. Orchids. Somebody just gave— oh, some beautiful, beautiful orchids. So are they buying stuff that I might be able to, you know, see as an indicator that they might be interested in my product? Can I find if perhaps they know somebody that I know on LinkedIn or something? And those type of things are really easy to find out today. And but on the other hand, why should I be spending my time on it when I can hire somebody who does it very, very well. And there are a lot of people. What I've done is I've reached out to some schools that have business intelligence programs, and I found people who are just graduating who want to launch their own businesses, which makes it very cost-effective for me. And I've been able to do that. I do virtually no cold calling or prospecting. By doing— using business intelligence tactically, by using tactical business intelligence, I've pretty much been able to avoid cold calling because I can get the name of the people I want and then I can have somebody reach out to them, set up an appointment, and then I can talk to them at a time when they've already agreed to. Now, not everybody can do that, but that's one of the, one of the uses and achievements that you can get through using tactical business Remember, when you're ready to grow your international sales, reach out to us. We can help. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
