Get a large prospect database to call on
In order to make the most of your prospecting time you need to have a large list of prospects to call on. As I mentioned in my previous post, prospecting time is not to be used for finding new prospects, it’s to be used for calling on new prospects. That means that you should have your list developed and organized before you start your prospecting time.
An aggressive cold caller can make 100 calls per day. To be able to do this, they have to have a large database and the confidence to call each prospect without doing research. There are many resources available that can provide you with quality information about business owners in your area as well as provide details about the nature of their business the size of their business the revenues that they have the employees that they have and even their technology purchasing habits.
Make the investment to get a database that is large enough to keep your salespeople busy and high-quality enough to make each call efficient. In addition, you should always be adding to the size of this database by putting in new prospects from people that you meet and business card that you collect.
Record every detail of each interaction with your prospect
Keeping very good, detailed notes of each interaction with your prospect turns your database into gold. When your database gets filled with rich information about each prospect, sales start to come more frequently and more easily.
• What type of systems do they prefer?
• When was the last time they made new system purchases?
• What’s their favorite baseball team?
• When do they do their budgets?
• Who makes the final decisions when it comes to IT purchases?
• Who are they currently working with?
• What are their favorite hobbies?
All of this information should be diligently recorded after every interaction with your prospect. You can use this information in the future to give you the best chance of success.
Use ticklers to ensure that you touch your prospects at least once every ninety days
We have found over time that 90 days is the maximum amount of time that you should let pass without making some sort of contact with your prospects. After 90 days, people tend to forget that you even exist.
The simplest way to do this is to create a tickler file that reminds you when somebody needs to be contacted. Each time you make contact with the prospect you should immediately record your notes and schedule the next contact that you’ll make.
This requirement to contact each of your prospects at least once every 90 days really determines the size of the prospecting database that each salesperson needs. For example, let’s say that a salesperson will consistently make 50 prospecting calls each day. Now let’s further assume that there are 22 working days in each month, and therefore 66 working days in each 90 day period.
The math says that the salesperson could theoretically only be effectively working a database of 3300 total prospects. Using these calculations will help you determine the size of the database you need to purchase for your sales team to work.
Of course, during the 90 day period, your salespeople will find database records that aren’t good, or will find businesses that will never be a good fit for your services. Because of this it is necessary to continuously update the database with fresh prospects – this should probably be done formally as a company every 90 days, and should be done continuously by your salespeople by adding prospect information from business cards they collect at networking events or from referrals.
MRC
