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.
No Comments yet »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
GimpStyle Theme design by Horacio Bella | RSS Entries and comments
All content copyright 2008, Supernatural Agency, Inc. | Sales Intelligentsia is a Supernatural Agency site.