Three Proven Strategies for Developing a High-Potential Prospect List

By James A. Baker
Founder
Baker Communications

What is every sales reps most dreaded activity? Prospecting and Cold Calling. There, I’ve said it, and now that it is out in the open, it doesn’t seem so scary does it? Well, maybe it still looks that way, but that is due, in part, to the fact that most sales reps don’t even understand how to get started. As long as someone hands you a batch of pre-qualified leads, you do okay. But, what do you do if the leads don’t pan out? What if they dry up altogether? Do you know how to start from scratch and develop your own high-potential prospect list?

Here are three proven strategies for putting together that golden prospect list:

Strategy #1 - The best way to ensure that your prospecting and cold calling efforts will achieve maximum effectiveness is to develop a profile of what you might consider an ideal customer for the opportunities and services you would like to offer.

1. Make a list of the features, advantages and benefits of the products and services you have to offer.
2. What value do these products and services provide the customer, and why?
3. Now, make a list of the different customer categories that are most likely to find these value items attractive and beneficial.
4. What kind of person or businesses want or need what you have to offer?
5. Now you can narrow your search for qualified prospects to the vertical markets and specific players that best fit the criteria you have created.

Strategy #2 - However, there is also another way to go about developing a profile for an ideal customer, and in some ways it may be a more efficient and more accurate way to put together a very useful customer profile. Instead of beginning with a hypothetical customer, begin by analyzing the best customers you already have. Go through your own active customer list and identify those customers that drive the most business for you. (You can also extend this survey to include the best customers for the entire company.)

1. What customers would you include on this list?
2. What character traits do these customers have in common? Needs? Goals? Business sector? Other?
3. Use the information you have gathered on your best customers to develop a master profile to prospect for new customers.
4. Once you have established the customer profile, you can then use a web based prospecting too like Jigsaw.com to search for and export contact info for any and all prospects that satisfy your profile criteria.

Strategy #3 - There is one other effective way to use your research about current customers to help you build a prospect list. Why not evaluate your present customer list for opportunities to develop new lines of business with these customers? This generally involves getting to know your customers well enough to understand not only what they need from you at the moment, but also what their long term hopes, dreams and goals are. The challenge here is to grow this relationship from one based on simple transactions to one based on a consultative partnership, so that the customer begins to see you as a trusted partner who can be relied up to bring regular, long term value to their business over time.

1. Review your present customer list and identify those who might be likely prospects you could approach for new lines of business.
2. What new products or services could you present to these customers?
3. Also what opportunities might exist to escalate the scope of the present products or services you are providing to them?
4. Make a list of the names of the customer sand the best new opportunities you could offer to each one.
Prospecting is a lost art among sales reps today, but it is the secret to sustaining sales success year after year. I look at it this way: Hand a rep a lead, and he can feed himself for a day. Teach a rep how to prospect for his own leads, and he can feed himself for an entire – very lucrative – career.

 

 

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Sales Quick Tip – Selling it NOT Telling
Of all the bad habits that are difficult for sales reps to overcome, the hardest one of all is our tendency to talk too much about what it is we are selling. We just can’t shake this instinctive conviction that if we could just make the customer understand how great our product or service is, they would jump at the chance to buy it! This is delusional behavior for one simple reason: you can’t sell someone something until you know what they really want to buy. How can you find out what they want to buy? First you have to find out what they need. How do you find out what they need? You have to find out what their problems and goals are. How do you find out any of this? By asking as many questions as it takes until you understand everything there is to know about their situation. Selling is ASKING however many questions it takes to find out what the customer is ready to buy. Then – and only then – can you tell them anything they want to hear.