Recently in one of my coaching sessions, one of my clients was ranting and raving about how difficult it was to hit her sales target. When I asked her how many new prospects she was calling upon recently, she just looked up and asked “what do you mean by new prospects?”
I was surprised that sometimes this “truth” was so easily forgotten in the midst of improving all the other important activities of selling such as closing the sales, preparing the sales pitch, follow-up with clients etc.
If you want to be successful in selling, prospecting is the number 1 activity, after closing that you will have to pay consistent attention to in order to succeed in selling.
Here are the 2 reasons why…
Every sales begins with the prospecting activity
Every prospect that you succeeded in moving them along your sales process will contribute to your sales success in the future. Therefore if you do not prospect regularly, you will find that your sales activities may come to a grinding halt! The law of attrition also works against you because your existing customer’s base will decrease with time (due to relocation, retirement, god forbid-buy from competitors, go bust, etc.) and therefore your sales WILL decrease and you will need to replace these customers with new and better quality ones! Therefore prospecting should be a salesperson’s never-ending responsibility and should not be treated as a part-time activity otherwise sales will slow down!
Question: How many hours have you dedicated daily or weekly on your prospecting activity?
2. New prospects bring in potentials previously unavailable to you.
I find this benefit as one of most significant but yet overlooked benefits of prospecting. Every customer that you prospect will bring in new experiences, energies and not to mention sale-potentials that were previously unavailable to you. Your new prospect would potentially be your top 10 client in terms of their sales contribution and they would open up a whole new network potential for you and your organizations. Every successful salesperson, I believe, will vouch for this!
Question: On an average how much does your new customer contribute to your sales monthly/yearly?
Hopefully by now you will agree with me that prospecting is the “lifeline” to your pipeline and this activity should not be neglected by you if you are serious in building your career in sales.
I will continue with the topic of prospecting by sharing with you the important facts and figures that you must know in prospecting and I believe some of us will be “shocked” to know how simple and yet effective it is to prospect if we know our own numbers in prospecting.
Watch out for my next posting till then have a good week ahead and feel free to share your comments and thoughts on this topic with me.
Be exceptional !