About the “Roadmap …”

Each issue of the “Roadmap to Sales Success” will contain items of interest to the business (especially the sales) community.

Following is the schedule for this volume, “Tales from Sales Street” – real-life examples of successful selling situations:

This Month’s Sales Tips …

“The man on top of the mountain did not fall there.” - - Anonymous  

Please see:
http://www.salespartnersinc.com for details

Having fun while Prospecting - - Vol. 2 No. 4 - - October, 2004

“Even top-performing salespeople dread prospecting, and it’s easy to see why. Despite their best efforts, the results are often disappointing.

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Prospecting is the act of searching for minerals or ore deposits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospecting

So for our purposes, it’s any activity that involves looking for gold!

The Importance of Prospecting

Whether you’re a “hunter” who is solely dedicated to finding new customers, a “farmer” cultivating existing accounts, or (like most) a combination of both - you will still need to “prospect” to find additional sources of sales revenue to grow the business.

However, even the most experienced salespeople will tell you that they don’t really care for prospecting.

• Because the “ROI” on their time and effort may not be there
• Because the prospects themselves are not always receptive
• Because, well because of a lot of reasons, like “call reluctance”, “self-consciousness”, “fear of sounding stupid”, etc.

Ensuring ROI on prospecting time and effort

A former Sales Executive used to have his people spend a lot of time doing “loss reviews.” Now, it’s important to have “lessons learned”, so that we don’t keep doing the same things wrong over and over and over.

However, it’s not always possible to find out the real reason(s) that things didn’t go our way. Suffice to say that sometimes, it’s better to not even know.

Our recommendation is to spend more time doing “win reviews” – finding out who the customers are that buy our offerings and why, and then focusing our prospecting efforts on similar people/entities.

If we do this, and combine it with targeted marketing, we can ensure that we’re calling on people who might/will have a reason to respond to our prospecting efforts.

Dealing with unresponsive prospects

Why are prospects unresponsive?

Usually it’s because the salesperson hasn’t presented enough of a “value proposition” to whet their appetite for our offerings. The value proposition is best proffered as a satisfaction to a known (or presumed) need.

We should know beforehand what are the challenges, pains, issues that our prospects face (or might face) and propose our offerings as viable solutions.

There’s an old saying in sales that, “No doesn’t mean no, it means not now.”

If timing is indeed an issue, get the prospect to agree on a better time. (If we’re calling on the right prospects, then there will be a right time – sometime!)

Other causes of concern regarding prospecting

The usual reasons for “call reluctance”, “self-consciousness”, etc. have to do with:

• the salespeople themselves not being fully convinced of the value of their offerings
• salespeople not being properly trained/coached/managed
• not being properly motivated
• not having a “robust”, easy-to-use prospect database
• similar

Or, the salesperson just wasn’t a good fit to begin with and more time should be spent in the recruiting/hiring process in future.

Real life example of a successful (and fun) prospecting effort:

Lee’s sales job required him to call on Senior Vice Presidents of a “Fortune 10” companies.

After doing his “due diligence” on one such company, on the relevant department, and on the executive, (and not being able to come up with any mutual “networking” contacts), Lee proceeded to send out a letter or two, then made the (dreaded) phone call.

To Lee’s surprise, the executive’s Personal Assistant (some would call this person the “gatekeeper”) had the last name of Lee.

Naturally, this became a point for relationship-building and rapport between them.

Also, naturally, Lee (the salesperson) did not get an appointment with the executive as a result of the first call – nor the 2nd, nor even the 3 rd call!

What Lee did get (as a result of the rapport) was the opportunity to discuss the executive’s challenges, etc. and, over time, present his “value proposition” to Lee (the Personal Assistant.)

Now when this Lee, a very bright and loyal person, came to understand that what Lee (the salesperson) had to offer and how that would help the executive, an appointment (and a subsequent sale) was made.

And the joke around the company was that the two Lees (friends now) were related – even though they had different last and first names.

TRUE STORY. (There are a lot of lessons to be taken from this.)

“Having and USING a contact management system is the foundation of success in sales (and especially in Prospecting).” - - Joyce’s Law #9

Next issue:

Be on the lookout for next issue of “Roadmap …” where the true story will be: “Networking Works”
Until then, Good Selling!!

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