Sales prospecting is one of the areas that most people find extremely hard to do. Not surprisingly, it has the most profound impact on the number of sales a person makes if they have to do the prospecting themselves. The better they are at prospecting for potential clients, the more sales they will make. The worse they are, the less sales they will make. Stands to reason doesn’t it?
However, people who do a lot of prospecting and do it well, can often still find themselves in a situation where they generate lots of leads, but get very little or no sales as a result of the leads they’ve generated.
Why? They don’t really fully understand HOW to prospect. To get a better understanding of HOW to prospect effectively, an interesting comparison can be made with the way business online and generating leads and sales online works.
Prospecting For Sales – A Comparison With Online Marketing
So how do you learn to prospect? Well the biggest lessons can be drawn from what a person has to do to get sales online.
What do people need to sell online? Traffic? Lots of traffic to their website? You’d think so, and yes, that’s the very same mistake people who try to market a product or service online make too.
They pay sites for guaranteed website hits, they use pay per click advertising with sites like Google, Yahoo and Bing, and they drive tons of traffic to their sites… and guess what… they still get no sales.
If you’ve ever tried online marketing and “paid for” traffic, you’ve probably, at some stage… been through that very disheartening and costly process. That’s exactly what happens in offline prospecting too. People will prospect, prospect some more and prospect again… but get very few or even no sales as a result of it. Of course that’s going to be disheartening.
However, one thing can make a big difference. A BIG difference…. and that difference is how targeted the traffic to a website is and similarly how targeted your offline sales prospecting is.
So contrary to popular belief whilst prospect is said to be a numbers game, it’s not just about churning the numbers. You can get the numbers without getting any results.
Sales prospecting is about getting targeted prospects who have an interest in what you have to offer!
NOT just number churning.
So, before you start prospecting, the key question to ask yourself is, WHERE am I going to find the potential prospects who have an interest in what I have to offer?
To answer this question properly, you need to know WHO makes the buying decisions for your kind of product and service, and what their profile is. The tighter you can define it, the more success you will have with your prospecting.
For example, if you are selling high end computer servers, your prospect is very unlikely going to be the home user. Now targeting them MIGHT get you some genuine leads, but simply by the fact that amongst those people will be business owners who express an interest.
So you’d have been better off contacting business owners to start with. Now, within those businesses, what kinds of business is more than likely to have a need? Probably not your “one man bands”. What you are looking for is businesses with maybe 5 or more employees as a minimum.
How can you narrow it down further? Well, not all businesses with 5 or more employees will necessarily have a need of a high end server. A cleaning contractor may have 20 or more employees working for them, but only need one small desktop computer from which to manage their admin.
So, you can narrow it further by looking at industries that you KNOW use computers that are networked together, and have the need for high end servers.
How can you narrow that down further still? Well, how about knowing which industries and more specifically which customers you are already dealing with? If you have just installed your servers within a few large accountancy firms, you know that there is a specific need within those companies, and you can use your existing clients as an example to get your foot through the door with new prospects within that field.
Now, can you find out who made the purchasing decisions within that company, and what the sales process was? Who were the key people involved? Was it practice managers? Was it IT bods? Or was it Partners within those firms? Who would make your best first port of call and contact?
Now… we’re a long way closer from just number crunching… we’re getting a lot more focused on highly targeted prospecting.
How can you narrow it down further? Can you obtain any background information or data that lets you know when they made their last purchase, to be able to see if their equipment is due for upgrade or renewal?
Now, of course I’m only using this as an example, but it should give you an idea that the sales prospecting process is only as good as how tightly targeted you make it.
The more tightly targeted you can make it at the outset, will give you far better prospects right off the bat, than if you were just number crunching for the sake of gowing through the motions, in the belief that “it’s just a numbers game”. It IS a numbers game, but it’s NOT “JUST” a numbers game. It’s a numbers game that should be played only with as tightly defined and targeted potential prospects before you even think about doing the actual task of sales prospecting. Spending time to define your best targeted potential prospects first, and doing some research as to where you’ll find them and who you will need to speak to, what their buying habits are, which industry they are in, what their interests are, or whatever else you can use to help you… will make you into a super sales prospector who is able to close 4 or 5 times the number of sales as your fellow colleagues, with just a fraction of the prospecting that they do.
And of course always remember… the best form of prospecting is getting a recommendation or a referral from somoene you’ve just sold to. That’s sales prospecting at its best, because you will rarely get a better lead to follow up, than one that comes from an already satisfied client.
So why not get out those old client lists and ask them if there’s someone they know? That way you build up a quick potential list of sales prospects that you can turn into buyers a lot quicker and a lot easier.
I’ll talk more about this subject in later posts, and for now…
Happy Sales Prospecting!
Tahir
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great post, thanks for sharing