For an organization to thrive under the current conditions – fierce competition, shrinking margins, more sophisticated and discriminating customer base – it must rediscover the will and the skill to hunt for new business. Said another way, they must rededicate themselves to prospecting. However, even when an organization rediscovers the value and necessity of prospecting, it may still stumble out of the gate unless there is a clear, actionable prospecting strategy in place.
Here are nine fundamentals that will help any sales organization drive a robust prospecting culture:
1. Change the attitude – Very few sales reps are enthusiastic about prospecting. It is tedious, labor intensive, and fraught with the potential for rejection. For these reasons, most sales reps typically invest a minimal effort, or maybe no effort at all, in prospecting. They could usually get away with this attitude when the economy was expanding and customers seemed to begging to buy. Now, for many organizations, the choice is to get serious about prospecting or get ready to fold. Sales managers must impress upon their sales teams that prospecting is now everyone’s top priority, and reorganize the activities of the entire organization to support this goal.
2. Get serious about targeting, territory and account planning – One thing is for certain; where there are no prospects or identified opportunities, there will be no prospecting. Sales reps must do their homework by studying their territories, identifying High Probability Targets, doing in-depth research to identify potential opportunities and key players inside the account, and developing a strategy for approaching each one in a way that will offer the best chance of success. This is the only way to start building out a pipeline that can help ignite your growth.
3. Adopt a prospecting cadence – This may be the most undervalued and overlooked step in the prospecting process. Prospecting is all about discipline. Very few people enjoy prospecting, so they tend to put off these activities in favor of more “urgent” (read fun or pleasant) activities. Soon they have fallen far behind and their pipeline is woefully undersubscribed. The only way to guard against this slippage is to schedule, map and track every activity for every day. Sales reps must commit to this schedule and sales managers must monitor and hold them accountable. Once the sales rep gets into the rhythm of the cadence, it is much easier to accomplish all the important duties on the schedule, and prospecting tasks will remain up to date.
4. Send marketing communication to targeted prospects – Most sales organizations still rely too much on disconnected marketing campaigns to funnel prospects to them. However, on average, fewer than 25% of these leads are ever called by the sales team. A more effective way to connect with prospects is to pave the way with a series of targeted emails that have been crafted and personalized to quickly get their attention. Any organization that has done a good job in Territory and Account Planning will know who to target and what to say, and marketing can help craft, meter and manage the messages and leads.
5. Follow up with focused calls – After marketing is issued or leads come in, reps should rapidly follow up with a phone call and a well-crafted elevator pitch. The follow up call must be no later than 24 hours after the marketing is sent or a lead is received, and even sooner if possible. Without a doubt, this is the most uncomfortable part of the prospecting cycle, because there is a possibility that the prospect will say no. However, with a little training, the sales rep can learn to be much more effective in quickly gaining rapport with the customer and delivering a targeted value statement that has a high rate of success for capturing the prospect’s interest. Will it result in a 100% acceptance rate? No. Will it result in delivering a significant number of new prospects into the pipeline that would not have gotten there any other way? Absolutely.
6. Qualify and have meaningful conversations – The purpose of the prospecting call, of course, is to qualify interest and have meaningful dialogue with prospective buyers. Research indicates that most customers say “no” six times before they say “yes,” but 65% of sales reps give up after the receiving a second “no.” If you don’t get a “yes” on the first call, that doesn’t mean stop. You probably learned something that will help you when you call back the next time. There is no reason to scratch the prospect off the list unless it becomes clear that he truly can’t benefit from your offer. However, if the buyer truly isn’t qualified, abandon and move on. No need to spend cycles on buyers that can’t buy. Those prospects should be transferred back to Marketing for ongoing nurturing programs. Just because they aren’t qualified today doesn’t mean they won’t be tomorrow.
7. Measure and track all activities – This step goes back to the cadence that we referenced earlier. Every activity the sales rep engages in with every prospect or customer should be logged into the CRM every day. Meticulously monitoring these activities is the only way to know what is working, what is not working, what tracks back to sales rep activities, what performance gaps need to be addressed before there are problems (with pipeline shortfalls, for example) and how to link back to skill gaps that need to be corrected in order to drive behavior change.
8. Prospect from the top down – Everyone in the company, from the CEO down, is responsible for customer success in one way or the other. That’s why companies are in business after all, to generate value for their customers. Executives are no less responsible for prospecting than the rest of the employees. In the most advanced cases, we have found companies where the CEO prospects side by side with the sales teams on specified blitz days. This not only shows commitment to the prospecting efforts, but also creates massive accountability and competition to successfully prospect at all layers in a company.
9. Coach to fill the gaps – This last fundamental is also often overlooked. Sales managers are busy and often harried by all the demands they must meet, so when performance gaps do become apparent, they have a tendency to just direct the sales rep to work harder or do something better next time. Instead, the sales manager must have a plan to coach the sales rep and help them improve. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time a sales manager spends coaching the team, and the team’s ability to close new business and drive more net-new top line revenue. The more out of shape a team’s prospecting skills are, the more urgently they will need regular, focused training and coaching from the sales manager.
Any sales organization that implements these nine fundamentals will ignite their growth, even in an uncertain economy. Heed the old saying, “he who hesitates is lost,” and get serious about reviving and driving a serious prospecting culture for your sales team today.
Walter Rogers is the President and CEO of Baker Communications. Baker Communications is a sales training and development company specializing in helping client companies increase their sales and management effectiveness. He can be reached at 713-627-7700.
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