Sales Intelligentsia

Sales Prospecting: A Geology Lesson

Before anyone becomes a customer they are a prospective customer or prospect in sales lingo. Depending on what it is that you sell, your prospects can range from almost anyone on the planet to a very few select individuals who have a specific need for your products. Selling something like food that everyone needs is very different than selling something very specialized like enterprise supply chain software. If you own a grocery store your prospects are so universal that you really don’t need to do any prospecting to find the ideal customer. Anyone on the street is a likely prospect.
It is almost a given that most salespeople have a much narrower potential market because it is in the nature of salespeople to be specialists. You must go prospecting to find those specific people who have a demonstrated need for your products and the ability to pay for them. Before you do any selling you need customers and the more targeted you are in seeking those customers the easier it will be to sell them.

Targeting

Target markets are groups of people who share a similar set of demographics, i.e. similar lifestyles, interests, income and education levels, backgrounds, etc. When you’re selling a very specific set of solutions (your product) you need to target your efforts at groups of people whose demographic profiles fit your market. Before this gets too confusing let’s look at it another way.
The original use of the word prospecting meant searching for valuable minerals or resources like gold or oil. Prospectors used everything from rumor to science to find likely spots before they started digging. Now, geologists use their knowledge of geological science to identify areas likely to produce riches. They look at local geology, rock formations and make-up, overall global geology including things like plate tectonics, that tell them where the mineralogical action is. Only after comparing hundreds of potential sites and doing exhaustive research will they recommend that the expense and massive effort of digging a mine be undertaken. Their preliminary research is designed to minimize risk and maximize return.
The amount of prospecting for likely customers that you do will have the same result. If you picked ten people at random from a crowd and gave them your sales pitch you would be lucky to sell even one of them, no matter what you were selling. If you put together a demographic profile of people likely to need your product and targeted a group of ten people with that profile including a proven need and the ability to pay, your closing ratio (or sales success rate) would be much higher, perhaps even 100%!
The importance of this aspect of the sales process cannot be underestimated. If you do an excellent job of prospecting to find an ideal customer group for your business, the sales process will become immensely easier and far less mysterious. You will spend less time explaining, little time cajoling and no time talking people into anything because they will already have a defined need for your products and a demonstrated desire to buy. If you are lucky you’ll become what many so-called ‘professional’ salespeople often deride: An order taker.

Order Takers

In the sales profession an order taker is a salesperson who sits and takes orders from anyone who walks in or calls needing their products. They don’t pitch, close or ‘hammer’ their customers, they simply take orders. Salespeople who must fight for every order and go out and constantly drum up new business put down order takers as unimaginative and unskilled clerical types. I see it a little differently.
As a salesperson you are not just a professional, you are a business owner. Your interest is in generating work, income and profits, not just sales. For many of us being order takers would be an almost ideal situation. We’d sit in our offices or shops and customers would come to us ready and willing to buy on the spot. It sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
The degree to which you are a salesperson vs. an order taker is determined by marketing and the type of business you’re in. Marketing is everything you do to bring customers to you prior to the sales process and everything you do afterwards to ensure their loyalty and generate future business. Sales is a part of the marketing process, the vital part where you turn prospects into customers. You have to learn your own science of prospecting geology and how to find the signs and formations that point you to the gold. With the right targeted profile you can reach out via marketing and work your way to becoming a very happy order taker.

Customer Profiling

I’m going to assume you already know something about your customers, even if you’re just starting out. That knowledge may not be accurate or even useful but it will serve to get us started creating a profile of a typical customer for your products. Start by listing any common attributes your current customers share. Some to consider include:
• Age
• Income Range
• Location
• Education including number of years and major interest
• Job Description
• Interest group membership including associations, industry or academic groups, hobbyist groups, etc.
• Sex, religious background, ethnic background, race, etc. Note: This information is gathered to help to find and sell to your prospects, not as exclusionary criteria. The more you know, the better equipped you are to serve their needs.
As you consider each likely or proven customer make notes of any attributes or interests that are common to the majority. These are pointers which can lead you to like-minded people who may share a need for your products. They also help you to create profiles of highly profitable customers so that you can go out into the marketplace and focus your sales efforts on similar prospects.

Selling Is Communicating

Selling is much more than a survival technique. It is a whole panorama of interesting and challenging skills, experiences and learning opportunities. It’s human interaction, education and motivation. Ultimately the ability to sell is the ability to communicate effectively with a wide range of diverse people.
Is it a talent? We often hear about ‘natural born salespeople’ who somehow have an edge over the rest of us. We repeatedly convince ourselves that we have no such natural ability until the words resonate in our heads whenever we consider selling. I don’t believe in natural sales ability or the lack thereof. What I do know is that some people have persistence and motivation and work constantly on their skills and that these people make great salespeople. They also make great bakers, consultants, graphic designers, athletes and politicians. They tend to be attracted to working on their own and succeeding or failing on their own merits. Sound familiar? It’s the same profile that leads to choosing self-employment as a way of life.

You’re A Natural

We all have good sales skills when it comes to getting what we want, especially when we’re young. Children regularly gather information about a desired toy or event and batter their parents relentlessly with that information. They use sales techniques that would make the slimiest used car dealer back off including blackmail, intimidation, acting out, hunger strikes, declarations of war and withholding of love to achieve their desires. When they win it is usually because they have eventually discovered the secret to all successful sales: Solving A Problem. The fact that they may have created the problem in the first place doesn’t mean that it is any less dire by the time their parents cave in.
Problems and Solutions
While you could employ the drastic sales techniques you used as a child in your business I doubt they would work as well. We’re adults and we don’t accept such behavior from our peers. Even if we did buy, we would never return and would undoubtedly steer others away from such a nasty individual. Because the success of most self-employed people is dependent on repeat business and referrals, the unrepentant childlike seller would soon be out of business.
Fortunately there is an important lesson embedded in these childhood experiences. The way to get someone interested in your work is to offer a solution to a pressing problem they have. You don’t need to be a quivering bundle of raging charisma to do this. You simply need to make a connection, learn about the problem, present a valuable solution and ask them to do business with you. This is the basic process of selling which underlies every transaction between humans: Meeting, gathering information, identifying problems, offering solutions and agreeing to terms. This site was written to help sales people like yourself understand sales as a process and to learn that process so you can apply it your individual business.

Sales and the Self-Employed

When you choose self-employment you, to a certain degree, choose a solitary existence. In other words, when it comes to many aspects of running your business you’re on your own. You may not have support staff to take care of accounting, buying supplies, answering phones and all the other little tasks that make up much of the daily grind of business ownership. You are the cook, bottlewasher, captain and deckhand on your ship. This single-handed existence is part of the intriguing challenge that makes many of us feel that self-employment is the only employment we want.
There is another aspect to the challenge of being in business on your own. No one is going to bring customers to you on a platter ready, willing and able to buy your products or services. You may start out with a few select customers from previous work relationships, relatives or friends. These ‘complimentary’ customers can help you get started but few businesses can survive on their limited needs. Eventually you must go out into the world and find and convince new, unknown people to buy from you. This is the sales challenge and those who do not willingly embrace it are likely to fail.
All too often the self-employed business person views selling as a necessary evil. A lot of us would like to work away at our skills, never taking the plunge into the world of prospecting, negotiating, educating and problem-solving that is the world of selling. We have been conditioned from early on to mistrust anyone who is trying to convince us to buy, even when we have a strong need for the product they’re selling. There is a saying in the sales world that people love to buy but hate to be sold. But is it true?
Mention the word salesperson to the average person and the first thing that comes to mind is an unfortunate experience with a car salesperson or a pushy clerk in an appliance store. Even if we have a great experience buying a car, we tend to view it as a battle in which we have somehow triumphed over the forces of greed and evil. Yet everyday millions of people happily buy billions of dollars worth of every imaginable commodity and in almost every case they have dealt with a sales professional. It is a paradox.
The reality is that sales and selling is the lubricant of a market economy, keeping the flow of goods moving, creating every job and making every successful business profitable. There are no exceptions. Without a sales effort, conscious or unconscious, you will not succeed in your business. In fact, small business studies and success profiles show that effective sales skills are the number one requirement for success in any small business. Sales ability is ranked above money, commitment, innovation and intelligence. No amount of these talents without some selling can get you market share and without market share you have no cash flow. Selling is survival.