By:  Dimic Robertson

Excerpted from My Sales Manifesto

Take a moment to think about the product or service you provide. Is it something that all people across age, income, and community (ethnicity/location/group values/etc.) purchase equally? Likely the answer is no. For instance, if you sell group health insurance plans, someone that is a senior citizen has no need for your product. Or, if you’re in the mortgage industry, you are only going to be working with people currently looking to purchase or refinance a house. The point here is that it is important to consider where your prospects are coming from and what their common characteristics and traits are.

Many of us have been in sales long enough that we’ve either worked in or heard stories of a Boiler Room environment. In such an environment, you are typically given a list of cold leads to call (names and numbers, if you even receive anything at all!). Now it’s on you to hop on the phones and start “dialing for dollars.” Well how many phone calls do you think you’d have to make before getting a sale in that environment? Some would argue that “hard closers” can convert at a high rate in these environments, and there is some truth to that but, remember, we’re looking to do right by people first and ourselves second. Not the other way around. In my experiences with cold lists, you have to make dozens and dozens of calls (at best!) before having a real chance of a conversion. Let’s dig a little deeper into the implications of working with unqualified leads such as these.

First of all, consider the “quality” of the prospects you’re speaking with. In this case, there is, in fact, no quality. This is because they have not been filtered in any way. And filtering is where the magic happens. A good way to illustrate this point is to compare the quality of one of the names on this cold list we’re talking about to a lead from a submission form that somebody completed on your site after clicking through a Google ad. The google lead is someone that typed in a very specific search (current need), found your company page, took action to click through, read your website and finally, submitted their personal contact info to you through your site (this is about as filtered as a lead can get; why else do you think Google makes over $150B a year). How hard or easy a conversation do you think that you’re going to have with that person? Heck, if you’ve been doing this any time at all, you already know that this is a virtual “slam dunk” prospect if you can just get in contact with them, right? So, take a moment to analyze those two prospect source examples I just laid out. Which lead would you want to work on? What do you think the difference in your conversions would be? Hopefully, you’re now starting to recognize the power that proper prospecting provides.

Go back to that cold lead environment (“Boiler Room”) for a minute and consider the psychological component on us as the salesperson. Put yourself in that chair. You have a list of dozens or hundreds of names and a script (maybe) and are expected to “smile and dial.” How long do you think you could stick it out making call after call, constantly being told to buzz off (putting it nicely), annoying people, trying to qualify the prospect while being hung up on half the time? As you would expect, these environments have high turnover because most of us aren’t cut out to keep making calls in the face of constant rejection over and over again. And the truth is, you don’t have to.
If you haven’t already, you really need to take some time out and identify who your ideal client is. If you don’t do this, you’re guaranteed to spin your wheels unnecessarily and perhaps wash yourself out of sales altogether.

** Depending on your knowledge of your audience and the service or product you provide, it may take you some time to determine who your actual audience is. On the other hand, you may have already established a 100% concrete idea of who your ideal client actually is. Either way, it is of the utmost importance to figure this out before you can realistically expect to have any success in your sales. **

If you’re anything like me, you’ve always been in sales but have worked in several different industries. One of my past businesses involved purchasing houses that were vacant or in disrepair. Probably our most successful marketing came from postcards. Now, it wouldn’t make sense to send a postcard to every address in town marketing our service, would it? Of course not. That would waste a lot of materials and money. So, what did we do? You probably have some ideas already, but some of the methods we would use included driving around town and taking down addresses of vacant houses, looking up names on the pre-foreclosure list, and looking up names that recently received a property inheritance. Now we are narrowing down the people we market to to only those who are really qualified for our service. And, just as important to note, we spent much less of our time, effort and money wasted speaking to people who we weren’t a fit for in the first place.

Once you have established who your target audience is, the next steps to figure out are where they are and how you are going to reach them. The first thing you need to know is what kind of advertising budget you have to work with. This is going to go a long way towards determining what your prospecting options are going to be. For example, if you have a several thousand dollar monthly budget, it’s probably easiest to buy some Google ad words or do some marketing on Facebook (if not hiring someone to handle all of your marketing altogether!). However, those are not good first options for most of us because they can be quite expensive. The typical self-employed or small business owner has a limited budget, so they need to be a little more creative in how to go about prospecting. I have a lot of background in the health insurance industry. Our products were targeted towards small business owners and self-employed individuals. So, in order to find prospects, we had to figure out where these groups are. The exact same holds true for you and your product or service. Do you have a product that’s targeted towards families? Do you have a service that’s targeted towards seniors? Do you have a very specific market, such as selling solar panels?
Now that you’re beginning to think in terms of where your target audience is to be found, you can start considering some of the prospecting approaches you want to take.