Business buyers’ behavior has changed radically over the last several years. One big change has largely been driven by technology, specifically the Internet. Google fundamentally changed the buyer-seller relationship.

In the post-Google world, buyers can type in the name of any product or service and will receive dozens of web pages, white papers, and webinars that will educate them on that area. Prior to Google, buyers met with salespeople to get this information.

The situation is getting worse for salespeople almost daily. Buyers meet each other on social networking sites and compare notes on your products and services without you ever knowing it.

However, technology is also working for salespeople. The most effective sales techniques have been around for a long time; it’s the tools that have radically changed. The three enduring techniques that determine if you will get into a buyer’s office are:

    * Calling the right people
    * Calling when people need help
    * Getting a referral

And there are several online tools that salespeople can implement to do more targeted, effective sales calls.

Call the Right People

The first factor in determining whether you get into the buyer’s office is whether you are actually approaching the right person. When thinking about the people you can speak to in a company, think broadly not narrowly.

If you sell an IT product, for example, don’t just write down that you need to call the chief information officer. Think of all the other people who get involved in purchasing your technology: all the users of your technology, all the other IT people, all the people in operations, and so on.

A great statistic from Marketing Sherpa is that for a technology product of over $25,000 in value, selling to a prospect company with over 1,000 employees, there are 21 people involved in buying that product. So you’ve got a bunch of people to try for that first real conversation.

After you have assembled a prospect profile for the companies and people you want to target, start playing with social media tools to refine your sales process. Jigsaw (jigsaw.com) is my go-to tool for turning my prospect profile into a list of actual prospect companies and people within those companies. The site is a comprehensive online database of up-to-date, downloadable contact information for millions of businesses, and was purchased by Salesforce.com a few months ago. Jigsaw provides contacts’ names, phone numbers, addresses, and emails.

What’s particularly useful about Jigsaw is that the data in there is from other salespeople and business owners. The outcome of this Wikipedia style “crowdsourcing” is that it’s much easier to find mid-level managers in there that you don’t find in more traditional databases like Hoover’s. This can be a huge time saver when your product or service appeals to a certain area of a big (or even mid-sized) company. Crowdsourced data also tends to be cleaner because there are so many people updating it.

Here is one example of how we improved sales results using Jigsaw: I used to run an outsourced telesales group for technology companies. I was amazed when my CRM system reported that some of our inside salespeople had called the chief information officer of a midsized services firm 20 to 30 times without ever getting through. It was commendable how well they stuck to their task, but they never once called anyone else in that company—end result, no progress with that account. When we thought through our approach, we realized we did not need to “paint ourselves into a corner” by just calling the CIO. We were able to come up with a list of seven to eight people in that company that we could call for the first conversation. We wrote down the titles of those seven to eight people, and fed those titles into Jigsaw. Within 10 minutes, we had their direct phone numbers and emails. We called those people and spoke to two of them who gave us vital information on that company.

Get a Referral

Social networks are great tools for creating a “social graph;” in other words, seeing who knows who. Social graph, a term coined by Mark Zuckerburg, CEO of Facebook, is a conceptual diagram where lines show a relationship between two people.

In sales, it’s critical to know what “relationship lines” exist that you can follow to get you into an account. Using introductions has been common in sales for a long time—it’s called referral selling. But now there are new tools that allow you to see who your friends know on a whole new scale—and that changes the sales game dramatically.

LinkedIn is the best social network for selling business-to-business. If you build yourself a decent network of people who really know you, and you maintain this network, LinkedIn will get you referrals into your target accounts more times than you imagine (you know it really is a small world).

There are some habits you need to get into when using LinkedIn to make this referral method work. One of them is to not connect to anyone and everyone. Only connect to people you know or people you are committed to getting to know and maintaining a relationship with. Why? Because when it’s time to get the referrals, you need a real human in the middle who actually knows you to make the referral. If the person who comes up as your first degree connection is someone you don’t really know, they are not going to help you. So if you have hundreds of first degree connections and only half of them are people you really know, you will waste a lot of time and make your work seriously inefficient by constantly pulling connections that are not real and will not get you anywhere.
There are other tools out there that help you map your social graph (many of them integrate into LinkedIn also because it’s such a powerful database of business relationships). One such tool is Xobni (“Inbox” backwards). Xobni (xobni. com) monitors the emails that go in and out of your Outlook inbox and infers social connections from who copies who on emails (all those cc’s). So by looking at your Xobni data you can see additional social connections you might not find on LinkedIn, and you just probably don’t notice from looking at Outlook. Another site that represents the future of social mapping tools is PeopleMaps (mypeoplemaps. com). PeopleMaps integrates with social networks like Linkedin, and your Outlook contacts, and literally draws out the social graph for you, showing you all the referral routes it can find from you to your target account.

A mid-sized technology company experienced more than a 50 percent success rate getting into Fortune 1000 target accounts by getting referrals from people in their network. They had previously only seen about a 1 percent success rate using traditional cold-calling techniques. Their salespeople used LinkedIn to find referrals to several executives in target companies that matched their prospect profile (remember, don’t target only one executive in a company). They found which people in their network knew these executives using LinkedIn. They called or emailed them and said, “I saw on LinkedIn that you know Joe Smith at XYZ company. Do you know Joe well?” It’s important to check that your contact really knows the executive, because they may not be using LinkedIn correctly and may be connecting with anyone.

When they got a positive response that indeed their friend did know someone in the target account, the salespeople asked for an introduction. The salespeople were prepared with a template email that their mutual friend could send to the target executive saying “Joe, I’d like you to meet my friend, Nigel; he’s a good fellow and I think you two should speak. He works for a midsized technology company.” This kind of referral worked for them more often than it failed. People like connecting people, assuming they trust you.

Keep in mind, however, that these new ways of connecting using social media do not replace talking and meeting with people. You can build initial relationships through the Internet, but you need to get offline at some point and make these relationships “real.” You need to speak to people on the phone and meet them face to face.

Call When They Need Help

Change happens. Examples of things that happen to your prospects are new executives, new product launches, cost-cutting, fast growth, mergers and acquisitions, and moves by their competitors. These changes are a salesperson’s ally because they create new needs. Almost always, events like these create the need for people to buy. You can find out about many of these changes by using social media and Web 2.0 tools to monitor and alert you when they occur.

SalesView (from InsideView) is a tool that makes tracking changes in your prospects really simple. In SalesView, you set up companies you want to track and you tell the tool what type of events you want to monitor in those companies (for example, new executives or product launches). SalesView will show you all the change events it can find for that company.

It scours thousands of sources of press releases and public financial filings to distill this list for you—that’s a lot of scouring. You set up alerts within the system that will email you when one of these changes occurs in your target company list (presumably generated from Jigsaw). The net result is that you can come in daily to a list of leads in your inbox.

Buyers are frazzled, with too much to do and no time or resources. Buyers have embraced technology to help them get more work done with less. They have turned to Google and social media to research products without taking meetings with salespeople. As a result, sales people and business owners were shut out of the process. But now, technology has appeared to empower the “sell side.” Business owners that embrace it will prosper. Those that don’t will continue to be shut out.

Nigel Edelshain is CEO of Sales2.0, a Montvale, N.J.–based sales consulting firm. He can be reached at nigel@sales2.com.