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| This is a weekly column transcribed from my Radio Show. The "Top Story" is the major discussion each week in which I address in great depth and detail, aspects of selling that are pertinent to your job everyday. |
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The whole concept of this week's top story is about how to build your business from scratch, how to go out there and find new people to talk to, how to prospect in your business without any pain. I call this top story painless prospecting.
Many people in sales actually fail because they don't have enough new people to talk to. For one reason or another, what happens is somebody gets involved in sales - maybe they inherit a bunch of clients or customers from the company they go to work for. Then if some type of prospecting activity is not happening, if a large account suddenly stops buying, or somebody gets acquired or goes out of business, the salesperson finds himself or herself in a very vulnerable position. And without enough prospects in the funnel, some of those salespeople fail. That, of course, breaks their heart. It breaks the company's owner's heart, and it breaks my heart because I think there is a way to make sure you're going to be successful always in your business. One of the ways to do that is by mastering a concept that I call painless prospecting.
Painless prospecting is something that we all have to master. The reason this came up is that just the other day I was spending some time in Minneapolis. During a break at the seminar I was leading, one of my clients said, "The main problem I have is that I've got mature salespeople who find themselves in a position where things are OK right now. However, our market is changing. They haven't had to prospect in quite awhile. They've been able to live off offering new and additional products to current customers. And we've expanded our service offerings. Just because of that, we're getting at or near plan just by offering more and more and more to our current clients. But as I look over the horizon there are so many changes happening in our business. And if a couple of my key salespeople lost one or two key accounts they would never, never, never, never recover. It would take them years to get back to where they were. My fear is that they would leave the company, leave the industry. And I'm stuck with territories where I can't make my quota."
That happens in many businesses. I think that a lot of people fail in sales because they get involved in businesses where they have territories that are basically bestowed upon them. There's enough to keep them going, and they never develop the prospecting skills to go out there and develop a business from scratch.
I've had the fortune or misfortune of being able to start from scratch in three different industries in three different cities with no accounts to start with. So you might say, based on the school of hard knocks, that I am an expert in how to go out there and knock on doors and build a territory from scratch. That's basically how I developed all these skills that I'm going to share with you.
Let's be clear. When I say painless prospecting, I'm talking about going out and getting brand new business. I'm not talking about offering new products to current accounts as I've talked about many times on this show before. I'm talking about going out and finding brand spanking new business.
I've got a theory called the prospecting matrix. The prospecting matrix is that you've got two types products, old and new, and two types of customers, old and new. If you look at the quadrants, you find quadrant one is offering current clients current products. Quadrant two is offering new products to current clients. Quadrant three is offering new ideas to similar type clients. And quadrant four is what I call the trailblazing quadrant. It's going out and talking to brand new people about your product and service. This is what I'm talking about today and how to make that painless.
Let me ask you a question. What happened to so many of the trailblazers or pioneers as they settled this great country of ours? What happened? Many of them got slaughtered. They never made it to the Oregon Trail. They never made it to California. They never made it even to the Rockies. They just got left behind in the Plains. They died of dysentery or they got killed or they got run over by a wagon wheel.
The reason I mentioned this is because we have to recognize that in this quadrant, this painless prospecting quadrant, in this trailblazing quadrant, we are going to face a lot of rejection. So be prepared that no matter how many skills I share with you today, your odds of going out and opening a brand new piece of business in the trailblazing quadrant in the short run are pretty slim. It can be done, but what we're talking about is going out there and developing relationships that eventually turn into business. So again, we're talking about non-referral prospecting. We're talking about the cold call on the brand new prospect.
Enough about the reasons and the strategy. Let's talk about how you do it. The first thing I would suggest is to think big. Think big. Look around your territory, look around your geography, and identify those prospects that have huge, enormous potential for you.
I was traveling with a salesperson in North Dakota about a year-and-a-half ago. He sold construction tools. He did new tool sales, rental, repair - all those types of things you see on a construction site: hand tools, power tools, scaffolding, ladders, safety equipment, all those things you'd see on a job site. As we were driving around this person's territory I kept seeing these huge jobs and on those huge jobs was a trailer with a general contractor's name on it. The first time I saw that trailer I said, "Is that one of our accounts?" He said, "Well, no, I haven't called on them." So I thought maybe they're a small contractor. Well the next thing is we came to a school, and there's the same general contractor's name. Five minutes later we were in front of a big addition to a large manufacturing plant, and sure enough the same general contractor's name was on the trailer. So now at this point I was dying. I said, "OK, how large is this contractor?" It turns out it was the largest contractor in his territory and he had never called on him. I said, "Well, why is that?" He said, "Well, I heard we used to do business with them about fifteen years ago, and they were unhappy with us and stopped buying from us." I said, "Well, fifteen years is a long time. We should probably go back." You could just see the fear in his eyes. Why would we go back and call on a customer that had a bad experience with us fifteen years ago?
The point here is think big, and also be strategic. Here this guy sold tools. Who buys more tools than anybody? General contractors, mechanical contractors, electrical contractors - any body on a job site buys a lot of tools. So strategically it has to be a good fit as well, and in this case it was a tremendous fit. Think big, that's number one. Number two is be strategic. Is it a good fit for you? If the answer is yes that gives you a heck of a lot of confidence going into that initial call.
OK, here's another idea. Don't just go in there and wing it. Don't knock on the door and not know what you're saying. Instead, write out your initial approach. Know what you're going to say. Introduce yourself, talk about your company, talk about why you're good at what you do, and make some type of opening, provocative statement, an initial benefit statement. Do something that gets the other person's attention.
In fact, there's a case study on my website right not, www.totalselling.com, that goes into this topic of how to go out and make that initial call. What it says is write out your approach. Understand what objections you're likely to encounter. Write everything out so when you go out and do it, you won't feel like you're doing it for the first time.
Let's go back to this story in North Dakota. That's what this salesperson and I did. We sat in the vehicle, and I said, "What do you know about this company? What would you say when we went in the door? How are you going to introduce yourself? What are you going to say about your company? What are you going to take with you? Whom are you going to ask for? What resistance are you likely to hear when you get there? How are you going to handle it?" So he said, "I'm going to tell them who we are, what we do, the fact that we work with many people like them in similar businesses. I understand that we did business with them a long time ago, and if there was a problem I'm here to make sure I can take care of that. Or if there are new people around who have never heard of us, I want to start over again and develop a relationship. I want to start from scratch."
So that is the understanding of how you write out your approach. The interesting thing is, if you think about it, if you were in a different business, would you allow yourself to go out without preparation? Think about if you were an actor. Would you just go out there and not know what your lines are? Would you never have rehearsed? Would you never have practiced? Would you just go out on stage and start blurting things out of your mouth? Of course you wouldn't. If you were a doctor, would you just show up in the patient's room with a scalpel in your back pocket and say, "I'm just going to cut you open here"? Of course you wouldn't. You would prepare. You would know what you were going to say. You would know what your approach is. Why do we allow ourselves in sales to go out there and wing it? Why do we think that we have to be extemporaneous? You have to plan, just like in any other occupation.
Here's another idea. Aim high. When you go into these large accounts, try and aim for the highest person you can. When we were in North Dakota, I said, "When we go in there, we want to find out who is the Controller, who is the CFO, who is the VP of Operations, who is the General Manager? Those are the types of people we're looking for." Aim high, and you will be amazed at how much information you can get once you reach the original person you're looking for.
OK, you're aiming high; you've got your approach written down; you're strategic; you're thinking big; you're ready to make that first impression; you can anticipate and overcome initial resistance. There are two more things you need to do to be able to make prospecting painless.
Number one is don't leave your answers to resistance in the car. If you've heard this show before you've heard me talk about this. What I mean is if someone says to you, "I don't need any new suppliers", do you just shake your shoulders and say, "OK, I guess I'll never call on you again"? Or have you heard that before so many times you know how to answer that question, and all you simply do is use the response that you've prepared in advance. For example you could say, "I'm not looking to replace your current supplier. Give me the really hard things. Just throw me a nugget. Let me show you what we can do. Give me a chance to be in second position or third position. Let me show you a small part of what we can do for you." So that's the way you have to anticipate and overcome and work with resistance that you're likely to encounter.
The final point is be neutral as to the outcome. You cannot control what's going to go on when you make that initial call on a brand new prospect. They might not be there; they might be in a meeting; they might not want to talk to you; they might be on vacation; they might have just signed a three-year exclusive contract to work with your fiercest competitor. You don't know what's going on. They could be having a bad day. They could find out that their cat ate the plant, that their child got thrown out of school, that their spouse is leaving them. You never know what's going on. Their boss just screamed at them. So you really can't accept any negative energy that comes your way because it's not necessarily directed at you because of something you did. The point is be neutral as to the outcome. In these initial calls you're going to fail 90% of the time anyway. So just accept it and don't worry about it.
I know you're all wondering what happened at that call in North Dakota. Knock, knock, knock. We walked in. We made our introduction. The receptionist was very kind. She had even heard of our company because she had been there for more than fifteen years. We asked for the General Manager. She asked us to hold on for a second. She walked around the corner. Our sales guy was kind of fidgeting. He wasn't sure what was going to happen. The guy walked out and said, "Oh, I've heard of your company. I wondered whatever happened to you folks. It seemed like you fell off the face of the earth a long time ago. You always had a good reputation around here. I wonder why you stopped calling on us."
Can you imagine? Here was a salesperson who had driven by that company based on hearsay and innuendo that they had a bad experience over a decade ago, and he had been afraid to make that call. This guy said, "Send me your catalog. Give me all the information. I know there's a need. We've got a bunch of new jobs coming up. We worked with you successfully in the past. We should probably get started again."
Now was that painless prospecting? What do you think? The answer is yes. And that's why that is this week's top story, painless prospecting.
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– Warren
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