There’s a Hole In my Bucket
If the phone rings and people give you an order
1) You’ve either reinvented the wheel
2) You’re an order taker or
3) You’re a prospector.
Sorry, facts are facts. Which is what leads us into the topic of prospecting because great prospectors look like order takes to those who don’t spend nearly enough time filling their buckets with opportunities. Make no mistake though; order takers are not great prospectors. Anyone can be a great order taker. It takes a lot of courage to become a great prospector.
Do you fill you bucket up with new prospects, potential clients and new sales all the time with out hesitation? So why is there a hole in your bucket? Because not everyone buys. Well that is at least partially correct, even those who buy lower the level of the water, granted it’s a great problem to have but a problem none the less.
Let’s look at Suspects
Sounds simple enough. You suspect that they might someday buy something from you. It’s an early stage maybe, an RFI (request for information), RFP (request for proposal) or RFQ (request for quotation). Maybe it was an ad or lead from an associate. A building permit or something of that nature. Your job is to qualify them, quickly and not waste time on dud’s but it is part of the process. Wait now… if you’re really quiet you can hear scores of sales people off in the distance pining about the quality of the leads they’re given. Now reality check… lead quality should be taken at face value and nothing more. A lead should be followed up seven times! Don’t stalk them but consistency counts, keep enough of the message the same that your calls and letters are recognizable as yours but like a great marketer tweak the message ever so slightly to get you point across and find the prospects interests and pain. Even if someone is transferring an active account to you, qualifying them is your responsibility. Simply put, you get paid on what you turn into business. Not that the person before didn’t do a good job, but they may have missed an opportunity, to add a complementary product or service or even something as large as and entire project.
Things to do: find out where you stand if they are a client you need to know who is number one in their heart. If it isn’t you, it’s your job to figure out how to get there. Be tactful but that knowledge of where you stand with them and who is in front and behind you is infinitely valuable.
One sales professional I worked with was working on a list of smaller resellers. He called and called and seemed to be getting nowhere. He’d call each lead three times and consider them dead leads when he didn’t get a call back. He changed the way that he was leaving voice mail messages and suddenly, like magic, things started to happen for him! One customer even told him that he had received his message some months back and just didn’t get around to calling him back. Things had changed on the potential customer’s side, and now he was ready to talk. He’s become a great account for this sales pro because he stuck with it. He changed his method and tried something new and started to see results! Interesting to note, this seasoned professional takes one hour per day, every day, and does his prospecting calls.
Tip: Leaving a great message isn’t active selling, you can’t make them want to buy in VM and frankly it’s awfully hard to do in writing as well but what it does do is build a familiarity with you. Make your message straight and to the point. Like all calls have a purpose and leave your contact info twice just to make sure they have it.
So where to begin on how to actually prospect? Of course we’ll begin at the beginning, Lets look at the tale of the two sales reps. Chuck and Beth.
Chuck was a curmudgeon of a man; he was the type of guy average performers hated. What he did do exceptionally well though was prospect for business using a career’s worth of contacts, in a company where the average deal was less than Five thousand, he wouldn’t, as he put it, burn cycles on “small deals” In truth he was smart enough to know that to get to 3.5 million in annual sales it took a boat load (or 700) average sales to get where he wanted to be. So instead he determined who his prospects should be. He focused, in his case, on multi site customers. Was this the right answer for everyone? No. A lot of people did just fine selling a lot of the average size deals. But they also only sold a third of what he did annually. The approach was different; he was as they say in baseball a home run hitter.
Beth on the other hand hit for average. She was new to the business at the very same company and struggled mightily for her first few years. Sitting someone down and handing them a phone book won’t make them a successful prospector. What she did learn with some coaching was that the little things mattered. First she set goals, sounds cliché but they were not the ones her manager set for her, she set them with her Manager. Agreeing to them only after she committed them to herself, the world could have been ending but she was still there making her calls.
The plan looked like this.
2 hours a day 10 hours a week she spent making cold calls. She could make 20 cold calls in an hour because most of her time was spent in voice mail leaving messages for her prospects. She kept good records of her calls and always had a way to refer back to the message she left when the person she left the message for called back. And in many cases, they did. Why? Because she gave them a reason to call back. She didn’t leave a detailed message when she left a message. She left just enough of a message to make the caller return her call and give her the opportunity to further qualify them. Beth believed that once she got the Suspect on the phone, she could turn them into a Prospect by learning more about their business, their needs and how she could help them. She asked a lot of questions. You know, the open ended ones that get people talking. She would then deliver a solution to their problem that would make their life easier. She became a trusted advisor. She earned their trust. She earned credibility and she earned their business. Then, on every occasion, the delivered just as she promised.
She did more than call, she followed up in a variety of ways. She sent letters, not form letters with a name and title inserted but she took the time to hand write a letter to the prospects that she felt she could help the most. As intensive an effort as this was, she took the time to research the top suspect’s web sites, press releases and trade magazine articles. (If you just can’t wait to find out how go to chapter 3 & 8). She would send the prospects and suspects reprints of articles, sometimes about the prospects own company, or their industry trends. It was never about her company, but about theirs, with a simple request for some time.
So what opened the most doors? It was a gimmick, this particular rep was so organized that she color coded everything. She wrote in colored ink, not the typical black and blue mixed in with the occasional red. She wrote in a myriad of pinks, purples, and bright greens. She would take a foam telephone with her company’s generic contact information and in bright pink letters put her phone number on it and a note to call her. So there is a dose of reality that worked to her favor, she had the personality and belief to back up her drive.
To close the hole in your bucket, you must set time aside each and every day for turning suspects into prospects. It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned professional or the newbie, prospecting is a part of your daily routine. Make it a ritual. Just like breathing…it’s a part of your daily activity. The customers you have today won’t necessarily be the same customers of tomorrow. In todays dog eat dog world, customers get lost every day. Perhaps it’s by acquisition, or by retirement, or by your competitor swooping in and “stealing the deal”. When you sell your value to your customer, they’ll come back. Tough question….what’s YOUR value? How are you going to make your prospects lives easier? Can you help them deliver a solution that will help them add value?
Things to Do: Take a moment and write down some thoughts on the value that you bring to your customers. We’ll come back to this in a moment.
So where do you find your prospects? Not every one is the right person for your product or service. The best place to find new customers is to look at your old ones who bought from you. Now your job is not to understand why they bought. It is deeper than that. You need to understand their reasons. Not what matters to you but what matters to them. Call them and ask them! What’s the worst thing that can happen? You can learn something about your customer; gain a deeper understanding of their business and what they truly value in your product or service. Maybe if worlds collide and the star aligns you might get another opportunity to solve a new business need they’ve had since last time you’ve spoken. What if you’re new and you don’t have any customers, find your mentor or manager and ask to talk to their customers. Or better yet, buddy up with a seasoned professional in your company and ask to take over Customers that they just don’t have time to work with. Every sales rep has them. Call these Customers! You never know when the next million dollar account will come along. If these Customers once bought from that seasoned professional, they’re likely still buying what you’re selling and, armed with the right value proposition, they might just buy from you. You’ll never going to know until you make the call.
TIP: As a matter of fact before you take a sales job check the company’s references, ask to talk to their references. They’ll check out your background… it’s a chance to check out theirs.
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