About Us
How It all started
During the early years of my career I was a traveling salesman. I used to go door-to-door, from house to house, and sell to people in person. They could be eating dinner, returning home, or watching television. Here comes this total stranger selling encyclopedias. Then I started selling technology services to businesses. It was my first salaried job. I sold internet service to companies that needed it to innovate their business. It was during a period of massive growth in the use and adoption of the Internet.
While searching for new customers, I experienced what it was like to sell new technology for a startup company in the middle of the dot-com bubble. I also worked for multiple companies that eventually failed. It was during those moments, in the pursuit of closing deals when I started thinking about the constant uncertainty, challenge, and stress of getting more sales. I eventually moved on to pursue other opportunities in sales.
When a salesperson leaves one company to join another, they’re expected to move from new employee status to a fully productive salesperson after ninety days on the job. To become a fully productive salesperson, I had to learn about the product, the market, the customers, and the competition all at once. Salespeople rarely have leads and contact details when they start off searching for customers.
My greatest challenge was connecting with people who needed to be involved in the process for making decisions. Sales calls were not easy. I think about all the failed attempts I made to negotiate meetings with potential customers. It always took a long time for the right contacts to agree on meeting with me, if at all. Whenever I talked with my peers, everyone experienced the same problem.
Sales prospecting
Sales prospecting is what people do to find new customers. To succeed at meeting with people inside a company, a salesperson must find a lead. A lead is a person who shows interest in the product or service you sell. The skills involved in finding new leads have nothing to do with closing a deal. There’s a lot of guessing about who to approach when you’re searching for leads inside a company. The B2B sales process is also more complex than B2C sales. When selling to another business, decisions are usually made by a group or committee rather than an individual. To find out if a company wants your product or service, you need answers from people inside, who are trying to solve a problem and want something better.
Sales Meetings
To get meetings with potential leads or prospects, I connected with my peers at other firms who were interested in the same market opportunity. I often wondered if there would ever be a way for sales professionals to connect around the same market opportunity without getting in each other's way.
I founded Incidr /inˈsīdər/ to make sales prospecting easier with technology.