I just remembered a story. It goes back to when I first started working in sales in 2008.
I was at Global Sources at the time, and I was doing a lot of prospecting. Finding customers in the import-export business wasn’t easy. You’d call someone, and it was very easy to get turned down.
The more prospects you reached out to, the better your chances of success, and the more customers you could close. But emotionally, it could be hard to take, because it also meant more people rejecting you.
So I thought of another approach. I set up an account on Sina Blog to create an identity for myself—an online presence, you could say—and started writing about how I did this work.
Later, the blog was indexed by Baidu. Since I was writing about Global Sources, it ended up ranking ahead of the company’s own website in Baidu’s search results.
What happened next really surprised me. The blog attracted a lot of traffic, and customers from all over China started finding me.
That experience made me feel that, as an ordinary person working in sales, you can sometimes get stuck in the process you’re expected to follow.
For example, you need to sift through phone numbers and companies, find the decision-maker, then call them or establish contact. Once you’ve made that connection, you try to turn it into a deal.
But within that whole process, perhaps there are other ways to approach the lead-generation end of things. It doesn’t always have to be me actively reaching out to prospects.
In a large company, though, you may be given a fixed set of requirements. You may not have much room to break out of that sales process. Is there another way to approach it?
So I think that, now that AI is here, we can try some new approaches to generating sales leads. As individuals, we may have more ways to move beyond our company’s established prospecting process and get ourselves seen by more people.
Of course, this is just an experience from my own days of finding customers. I thought I’d share it again today.
