Prospecting Techniques

Are you satisfied with the number of sales you are making? If you are not, there is only one thing standing in the way. You just are not seeing enough of the right kind of prospects in the right way.

That might seem like a pretty rough statement, but think about it. Every sale you did make came about because you located a prospect who bought from you after listening to your proposition. Right? Your prospect, your presentation, and your timing were just right to create the sale.

Sales Start with Prospects

No salesperson will argue with the observation that before you can make a sale, you must have a prospect.

In today’s recession, industrial salespeople have different prospecting problems from salespeople in consumer markets. But every salesperson must sharpen his or her skills in finding and qualifying prospects for both immediate survival and future growth in selling. In some lines of selling, it has been estimated that prospecting skills account for 80 percent of the salesperson’s success.

Where to Find Prospects

Studies made on why salespeople have difficulty in getting good prospects show that the poorer salespeople have one or more of these three deficiencies:

1. They don’t recognize good prospects.

2. They don’t know where to find them.

3. They are too lazy to look for them.

Let’s consider the first two problems. (There is not much we can do about the third one here!)

Even the professional sales representative will pass by good prospects every day without recognizing them. A new company comes to town or a new family moves into an apartment. A small company grows without the salesperson’s knowing it and now could use his or her products which they had no use for before. A change in management occurs and the new authorities might be more receptive to the same offer which was turned down previously. Existing customers have additional needs that could be filled by the salesperson if he were just aware of what was going on in other departments.

Certainly, everyone is going to miss some opportunities to some degree. But in today’s economy, the sales professional takes nothing for granted. He or she does more checking, more prodding, more observation to find prospects. Let’s look at some of the sources salespeople have for locating prospects.

Eleven Ways to Recognize and Find New Prospects

1. Existing Customers. Salespeople naturally expect to get reorders from their regular customers. But every present customer is also a prospect for goods or services he or she is not presently buying from the salesperson. Too often a seller discovers that one of his good customers has purchased something from a competitor which the salesperson could have sold the customer had he known the customer was in the market for it. In most of these cases, the customer didn’t realize that he could have obtained the product from the first sales rep. The other salesperson just happened to be there at the right time with the right suggestion.

Existing customers are the best kind of prospects. They are easier to sell than a new account because they are already satisfied with you and your firm.

2. The Prospect Chain. Use your present satisfied customers to forge an endless chain of prospects. Most customers are flattered to be asked to supply the names of friends who might be in the market for your product or service. Your request for prospect leads is particularly timely just after you have completed a sale and the customer is happy with the result.

To get an idea of the tremendous possibilities of the endless chain idea for getting prospects from existing customers, suppose you select just one of your customers and get enough leads from him or her to end up with two more customers. Get leads from these two additional customers in the same way and you end up with four more customers. Repeat this process with equal success just a dozen times, and on the twelfth round alone you would add over 8,000 customers as a result of the two leads you got from the first one.

Obviously, the system doesn’t work as well in practice as it does on paper. Even if it did, no salesperson could physically handle such results. But would you settle for just 800 new customers from one? How about 80?

3. Inactive Customers. If you have been selling for a reasonable length of time, you have lost your share of customers. How much would your sales be improved if most of your old customers, or the customers of the salespeople who preceded you in the territory, were back on the list? When you are looking for prospects, check the inactive accounts in your area.

Weed out the impossible ones. Consider the rest of them as prospects. Call on them to find out why they quit buying. Correct any misunderstandings that may come out in the interview. Find out what it would take to get them buying again. There may have been some changes since you or another salesperson called on them that could now make them customers again.

4. Same Market Segment. Whenever you sell to one type of business or market segment, use the sale as a testimonial to sell the same product or service to a similar business. If your product or service made one bank’s recordkeeping easier, another bank would be glad to hear about it.

Try to get the personal assistance of the customer in these cases, as we suggested before; but following that, make your own list of prospects in similar businesses or markets in similar situations.

5. Advertising leads. Most business firms will advertise their merchandise or services to get leads for their sales force or to persuade prospects to visit the store or showroom. When the leads from the advertising involve making a call on the prospect, they should be followed up quickly. The advertising investment is wasted if the follow-up is delayed too long. If a competitor happens to contact your prospect first, you risk losing the sale.

6. Business Directories. Every community has published lists of people and business firms from which the professional salesperson can collect prospects. The classified telephone directory is perhaps the most used printed source for prospects. Owning a telephone doesn’t tell much about the quality of a prospect, but the classified directory does break down the firms and professional people by types of business or trades.

Libraries and government offices will have other directories that are helpful in searching out specific types of prospects. Government records on taxes, licenses, building permits, births, deaths and similar data will give specific types of prospects.

Often two salespeople will exchange prospect lists when their products or services are not competitive but their customers can use the services of both.

7. Newspapers. Get prospect leads from the news stories carried by the local newspapers. Real estate transactions, weddings, obituaries, promotions of executives and business reports are favorite prospecting events for salespeople with products or services related to the persons or firms involved. Industrial sales reps watch for newspaper stories on new businesses in town, reorganizations, staff changes, new branches, expanded production, big contracts awarded, new owners and moves to new locations. One good approach used by many is to congratulate the prospect on the good news, or sympathize on the bad news, then offer the services to help solve any resulting problems.

8. Bird Dogs. Like the hunter who uses a trained dog to run before him to spot the game and flush it out, many firms use people other than salesmen to locate and check out prospects. These prospects are turned over to the experienced salesperson for follow-up and sales presentations. Frequently, sales trainees are used for this purpose because it gives them valuable experience which they can use to great advantage when they are assigned to sales territories of their own. Service and repair personnel and other people whose jobs involve meeting the public, make good prospect spotters.

9. Centers of influence. Certain persons are in a position which gives them influence over other people who have the final authority to buy the seller’s goods or services. They may influence this person sufficiently to cause the sale to go through, or they may give the salesperson important information he or she can use to help persuade the key executive to buy. Examples of these centers of influence are lower level executives, secretaries, wives, teachers, bankers, politicians and building managers. They may offer their influence out of pure friendship or expect to gain from the sale themselves.

10. Listening. You can pick up prospect leads merely by listening for them. Conversation with friends and acquaintances, or even just listening to others talk, can frequently result in getting the names of actual prospects or ideas for locating them. Go to clubs and social gatherings. The people there are potential prospects or represent firms who might be. When you tune your ears and your mind to recognize leads, you’re more apt to recognize them. Be particularly careful not to betray a confidence.

11. Cold Canvassing. The cold canvas is not last on our list because it is considered least important. Actually, this method produces the most prospects in many areas of selling. In most selling, it uncovers leads which cannot be found in any other way.

Every professional salesperson will agree that that’s why the salesperson also finds the least competition there. But intelligent, selective canvassing can produce a high rate of profitable returns. Knocking on doors may not be as profitable as following up selected leads, but when the prospect list starts to get low, you will find that there are few substitutes for smart canvassing.

Prospects Protect Your Selling Career

Your good customers of today, no matter how satisfactory their volume of sales, may be lost tomorrow for one reason or another.

If you expect to grow in sales potential and earning power, you must get the growth either from existing customers or from prospects you can convert into better customers than the ones you have. Many salespeople feel that they must have as many prospects on their list as they have customers to guarantee their current volume and to provide for reasonable growth.

Through intelligent prospecting, careful qualification and cultivation, you can assure your future success in selling.

Prospecting is your best recession insurance.