Ask the Sales Doctor - Total Selling Systems

Warren Wechsler's
Ask the Sales Doctor

Prioritizing Prospects

Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Some restrictions apply to the use and distribution of this information. For more valuable materials, visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com. All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.

Keith Monson writes:

How do I prioritize my prospects and accounts? I am new in sales. I have some accounts that have been assigned to me. How do I prioritize and how much time do I spend with each account?

Warren answers:

Keith, that's a great question and I'm going to answer that three ways. The first is that I'm a strong believer in prioritizing your book of business, your accounts, into thirds. That's a simple A, B, C methodology. That means that some of your accounts are A's, some of your accounts are B's, and some of your accounts are C's.

An A account is one that's going to have a large number of positives in these next five attributes I'm going to talk about. And that's the second part of the way I'm going to answer your question. When I look at prioritizing my accounts by priority I look for: how much revenue either is current or potential in this account? What's the profit potential or actual in this account? What is the loyalty of revenue; is this going to be a transaction I get one time, or is it an ongoing relationship? What's the name recognition? Is this the type of company where if other people ask me whom I work with, would I be very excited to say this is one of the companies I work with? And finally, the fifth attribute is what type of referral potential would this person be? What type of center of influence or very important person would this person be as far as referring me additional business down the road?

So I've just mentioned five criteria: revenue, profit, loyalty, name recognition, and referral potential. What I would usually do is rank my clients either with a check mark or no check mark. So the total potential is five points. If someone had great revenue, tremendous profit opportunity, was going to be loyal revenue, and had strong name recognition, that was four out of five, and that was an A. Any client or prospect that has four out of five under that system is an A. If they have three or two, that's a B. If they have one that's a C. If they have none, then my question is why in the world are you calling on them?

So the second way I'm going to answer the question is to rank your clients in terms of criteria that you set up, or you can use the five I just mentioned.

The third part, and here's the tricky thing, is an application of the 80-20 rule. That is you spend 80% of your time with the top 20% of those accounts and prospects. Let me repeat that. You spend 80% of your time with the top 20% in terms of numbers. Conversely, you spend 20% of the time with the rest of the 80%. You might say, "Warren, why in the world would you even have those bottom 80% in your book?" The answer is you're looking for tomorrow's 20%. Within that 80%, someone or some company is going to bubble up and become a really strong client over the next three months, six months, two years, depending on what your sales cycle is.

The other reason you're always farming within that 80% is that you may lose someone from that top tier, and you always need to be finding ways to replace that business.

This was a partial transcript from Warren Wechsler's weekly radio show. Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com Also, listen to Warren's weekly radio broadcast Wednesday's at 4:05 - 5:00 pm Central time, on KMCD-AM 1570AM. Shows are broadcast live on the internet at http://www.warpradio.com/asx/KMCD-AM.asx