How did you get my contact details?
6 effective ways you can answer this question from a prospect
Have you ever been asked the question over a cold call or a cold email?
As a marketer or salesperson, do you find yourself stumped on how best to answer this?
At Alore we are primarily a sales service provider but often help select clients set up/refine their outbound sales campaigns over 3-month projects. We’ve found a lot of our clients mention struggling with handling this question.
The thing is, it's important to handle this mini-objection well. It is generally one of the first questions asked and hence sets the tone for the conversation ahead.
Here are some interesting and effective ways we’ve researched and brainstormed on handling this mini-objection:
1.Talk about your real/imaginary research assistant:
Say that you have a very efficient research assistant or VA who helped you find the prospect’s contact details and that he/she is really great at his/her job and how proud you are of having such an efficient colleague!
2. Be Honest:
Just get honest and say that you found how the prospect fits the ideal customer profile of your business and since you're good at your job you ensured you found the details via publicly sourcing the data.
3. Handover document from the previous colleague:
Say something like “Well my colleague just quit recently and she had planned to reach out to you. So while she was handing over her work, she wanted to make sure I don't miss reaching out to you “
4. You reverse engineered the email ID:
This will probably not work on a phone number but if you’ve cold emailed you can always say that you went on the website and figured out the email domain extensions. Post that you figured out the most logical email IDs possible.
5. Use Humor:
Say something silly to diffuse the situation like — “Batman gave it to me ! “ and then laugh it off while changing the subject. (Be careful about using this one. Avoid it on an uptight prospect or if your businesses demand a serious disposition)
6. Total transparency:
Admit it that finding email IDs is not so difficult today. Tools like the Alore chrome extension, Hunter, Dux soup, Phantom Buster, Lusha etc. help you cross the initial hurdle of finding contact details of prospects and as salespeople and marketers its part of your job t know how to use these tools well.
IMPORTANT:
Whatever you do, never talk about buying lists even if that’s how you got their email IDs in the first place. It’s pretty simple, would you like being reached out to if you’re just part of some stupid list? I wouldn’t be and I assume our prospects wouldn’t be either !!
I even find this geography dependent. Talking from experience here after having set up hundreds of campaigns for clients, I’ve found this particular objection more common during cold outreach campaigns in Asia and Europe. North Americans seemingly are more accustomed to being cold reached out to and don’t ask this question as much.
Would love to know how you answer this particular objection?
