Cold calls and mass-mailing have come to an end.

The conversion rate of cold calls (ie buying a business directories and call top executives to catch a meeting) has fallen down to less than 10%. If you are good, you then need to place 50 calls a day to effectively conduct 10 phone conversations, and catch 1 real face-to-face meeting. Welcome to the sales factory !

Mass mailing is even worse : conversion rate between email and phone call is now at the tremendous rate of 0.5% and down to 0.1% for physical meeting.
Why ? Because we all do the same thing and decision makers receive dozens of sales calls per day. Industrialization of B2B selling is definitely over.

The most effective way to convert calls into meetings is to come back to the very efficient ways of selling in the old days : humanize the sales processes. Your current clients and your personal contacts are your ambassadors, can be leveraged as introducers and named as recommendations.

Knowing that your target plays golf and likes its iPad may not be very helpful in fixing an appointment.
Otherwise, if you know that this lead or prospect has personal ties with one of your current client (or one of your partner or even one of your facebook friend), you then have a great chance to catch his attention, set trust between yourselves and catch a sales meeting. Right ?
With this sales strategy, IKO users achieve a phone-to-meeting conversion rate of up to 80% !

IKO System does one very simple thing : we map the relationships between all of your CRM contacts.

Oh, and we also do something else : we analyze the billions of relationships between 150m of professionals to warn you of leads, opportunities and threats within your portfolio.

IKO System is now integrated within Salesforce.com. Watch the demo and give it a try on the SFDC AppExchange !