Good prospecting isn’t something that happens by accident. In fact I would say that a good managed services prospecting process is something like a factory. Good prospecting happens when a salesperson follows a specific process very consistently day in and day out.
To make sure this is accomplished, you must ensure that the right systems are in place and that you and your team follow-through consistently.
Schedule prospecting time
When you’re a busy owner or even a busy salesperson the easiest thing in the world to do is select a second time slip off of your calendar. There is always something more important that comes up each day and it becomes easy to let their prospecting time on your calendar get pushed around.
You absolutely must not let this happen. Every salesperson should have scheduled a dedicated time on their calendars that is 100% devoted to prospecting. This time should be held as absolutely sacred. Come hell or high water, prospecting should be done during that time every single day.
One of the most impressive examples I’ve ever seen of this was from one of our first clients at Everon. Two Harvard MBAs were starting their first company, and realized that they had very little time to get revenue coming in the door. Although they had 1000 things to do each day including finding new employees, finding vendors to work with, and developing their products and services, they realize that the most important thing that they could do was to find new customers.
During my first meeting with the founders of this company, I was surprised when one of the first things that they told me after they said that we would be working together was that I shouldn’t bother calling them after 8 AM or before 6 PM. That didn’t leave very much time in the day to work with them as far as I was concerned.
Why were they so strict about this?
Because from 8 a.m. to 6 PM every single day, they sat together and did nothing but prospect. They knew that the single most important thing that they could be doing every day was finding new prospects and finding new revenue. Until they do that nothing else mattered. This was the greatest example of prospecting discipline than I had ever seen.
It would be hard to maintain this kind of discipline once a company got going, but it would also be the most powerful thing that a business could possibly do. These gentlemen knew their first priority so clearly that the major that nothing else got in the way of it. This is exactly how salespeople at your company should treat their prospecting time each day.
Let’s make sure that we have a clear understanding of what schedule prospecting time means.
It doesn’t mean researching prospects to call on.
It doesn’t mean reading the paper to find new prospects.
It doesn’t mean organizing your list.
It doesn’t mean putting together proposals.
And it certainly doesn’t mean spending 15 minutes getting coffee.
It means prospecting: making phone calls, sending e-mails, and having conversations with potential clients. Everything else can be done later.
Schedule administrative time
As I said above, everything other than selling can and should come second. Just as you should schedule solid blocks of dedicated prospecting time, you should also schedule solid blocks of administrative time.
If someone asks you to send them a proposal or anything else that will require your manual effort to complete, do your best not to let it interrupt your prospecting time. You can usually accomplish this by asking your prospect, “No problem Mr. Prospect, do you mind if I get that to you at the end of the day (week)?”
In almost every case, this will be fine. This strategy allows you to do the administrative work necessary at a later time that is convenient to you and doesn’t interrupt your prospecting time.
Contrast this to the typical salesperson reaction, which is to get excited that somebody actually gave them the time of day, then spend the rest of the next several hours putting together the perfect proposal for the prospect. That’s good prospecting time they burned putting together something that could have waited until a better time to be done.
MRC
