Among industrial selling professionals, there’s still some resistance fighters, making their last stand to keep old-school, played out, traditional methods of marketing alive.

Some industrial selling professionals are determined to use the methods that worked back in the day, hoping that their results will match the numbers they used to post up on the scoreboard 15 years ago. Perhaps, some who are just beginning their industrial selling careers are being trained by 20+ year veterans who used to crush with some trade show and snail mail marketing.

Today, most rookie industrial selling professionals wouldn’t even know how to lick a stamp and drop an envelope in a post office box.

I’m just going to put this out there and see what happens – traditional lead generation methods, including trade shows, print, snail mail, and networking events, don’t work like they did 15, 20 years ago. So, let’s look at what’s working now, in the digital landscape, to target leads, prospect effectively, and fill your industrial selling pipeline from your smartphone.

Some industrial selling professionals are encouraged to use more traditional methods of marketing and outreach. So, they choose to go to networking events. This is one of the best ways to break the soul of an industrial selling professional. When you do local networking events, you have to deal with commute times, the audience is usually not going to be super targeted, which means that industrial selling professionals will also deal with a low level of interest in what you have to sell.

When it comes to building a list from scratch one tool you can use is ZoomInfo. This is the tool MFG Tribe founder, Kyle Milan, recommends for data scraping activities. Industrial selling professionals can use this digital tool to pull current contact information from people and companies for cold outreach and email marketing.

Some people use data.com, especially people who use Salesforce. But all industrial selling professionals should note that the info can be outdated with data.com.

ZoomInfo is what Kyle uses for accurate, current, and complete contact details. The only problem is the cost of the service. Though prices may vary, Milan paid $5,000 upfront to access this digital tool’s capabilities. But the value of being able to target a company and collect accurate contact info of various titles that you can target in that company so you can directly email and call the target titles that are important to you is off the charts. Plus, I can’t imagine an industrial selling pro who won’t love the fact that you can export the contacts you scrape.

Trade show marketing has been a top lead generation strategy for industrial selling professionals for ages. In the absence of other methods, it has certainly been an effective way for industrial selling professionals to connect with their target audience, generate leads, and even get new deals under contract.

However, today, there’s a better way. I’m not suggesting that trade shows cannot yield any results. But when you consider the time, cost, and effort that you put in to attend one trade show, it’s clear that industrial selling pros can yield far greater results, day-in-day-out, connecting with your target audience from your smartphone. Industrial selling professionals can generate leads, manage your lead list, set appointments, and follow up with an unlimited number of prospects using LinkedIn.

Ready to take your Industrial Selling Career to the Top? Enroll into Industrial Sales University! 

While you may squeeze 10 – 20 leads out of a 3-day trade show event that took a full week out of your life and only comes once a quarter, you could generate 20-30 leads a week, every week, just doing some daily outreach on LinkedIn sitting at home on your smartphone. That would literally mean generating 12X the number of leads in a quarter by embracing digital marketing tools. That changes the game for any industrial selling professional, fast.

You can leverage LinkedIn for cold and warm industrial sales outreach strategies that include connecting, engaging, building trust, and setting appointments.

I’ve seen industrial selling professionals get a 30-40% acceptance rate when sending connection requests on LinkedIn. If you consistently take 10 minutes to send out the maximum number of connection requests you are allowed to send each day on LinkedIn, you can make 10, then 20, and even more new targeted connections with highly targeted leads! Then, if you send each connection 2-3 pieces of valuable, non-aggressive content, once every week, it will make sense that after giving all that value, you request a video call.

Industrial selling professionals not using a CRM are likely using good old-fashioned spreadsheets. This is a problem because a CRM is so much more than just maintaining contact information of leads – as is the case with spreadsheets.

Some industrial selling professionals use Salesforce and think it’s the best digital tool out there. Salesforce is a great platform for enterprise level sales teams – say, 100 industrial selling team members and up. However, Hubspot is our recommendation for combining industrial sales and marketing from a single smart platform.

With Hubspot, you can import lead information, track leads through the lifecycle, set reminders, tasks, and use email automations to follow up and nurture leads. But while Hubspot may be the cream of the crop, you can get started with a simple, low-cost CRM if you need to. If you’re an industrial selling professional responsible for securing your own CRM, you can do well with MailChimp, Aweber, or ActiveCampaign, for instance.

Watch the full 42 minute video “Advanced Automation in a CRM here

If you’re an industrial selling professional who wants more results from your efforts, then you should modernize your game and embrace digital tools that can simplify, streamline, and skyrocket your success. Transition from one-on-one interactions to one-to-many engagements, expanding your presence simultaneously in multiple places.

Traditional industrial sales methods work, but not nearly efficiently as modem lead generation with digital tools. You can use automation technology and digital tools to construct a smart and highly profitable modern sales pipeline that turns cold leads into hot prospects on autopilot. Savvy industrial selling professionals in this new era know how to work traditional AND cutting-edge lead generation opportunities to maximize sales success.

Ready to take your Industrial Selling Career to the Top? Enroll into Industrial Sales University!