Getting past technologies such as voice mail, spam filters, and number blockers is one of the biggest challenges salespeople face in trying to reach decision makers today. Since you’ll rarely outsmart it, your best bet is to make peace with technology and use it to lure prospects out from behind their protective walls. In a sense, selling is a lot like golf. As a golfers’ skill and equipment improve with every decade, golf course owners must adapt by making their courses more challenging. They add trees, more sand traps, or make the greens faster. In the game of sales, the buyers have similarly changed the rules of the game. Now sellers must use their skills and technology to adapt.

Here are some effective ways to do it…

Web seminars. Webinars are a great way to educate your market on current, relevant topics. They position you as the expert in a topic without making an in-your-face sales pitch. Figure out what issues your prospects are struggling with, construct a seminar on the topics in which you specialise, then market them via “opt-in” email campaigns.

Blogs. A blog is an informal journal that is posted online for others to read and give a comment. It is one of the fastest-growing sales tools on the market. By writing about your products and their uses, successes, failures, and trends you observe in the marketplace, and by updating the blog frequently, you build a reputation of credibility, expertise, and integrity.

Online newsletters. Like Webinars and blogs, online newsletters unobtrusively position you as the go-to source in your area of expertise. And since they are published on a regular schedule you get your name in front of prospects again and again so they’ll think of you first when they need the kind of product or service you provide.

Targeted fax campaign. Unlike emails, which are easily deleted, faxes are typically placed in the recipient’s in box. Use fax campaigns to conduct surveys; then offer the results of the survey in a white paper to everyone who responds. Fax numbers are easy to find. You can get them from a prospect’s Web site or you can simply call the front desk and ask for the fax number.