By Colly Graham salesxcellence
Business?s often live with the hope that if they build it, customers will come. But in today?s economy, it takes a lot more than hope to get people to purchase your products or services. New business-building practices are a must if you want to expand.
In a perfect world,?you would have an unlimited budget to market your business in order to find new customers and increase sales. You could buy lots of online and offline advertising, run promotions to build traffic in store and online, and launch a proactive public relations campaign to increase your product or brand?s visibility and awareness. But this isn?t a perfect world. Most SMEs do not have a fully-fledged marketing department and need to rely on the sales people to generate new business leads.
In another life as a sales manager, we ran sales training session on Monday mornings and the most requests were, ?Colly, helps us close more sales!? My retort was ?How many sales did you open last week?? The sheepish reply was usually less than three or four, so the problem with sales people is not necessarily closing sales but opening sales ? prospecting for new business
As with all aspects of business you need a strategy and a plan to prospect and generate quality new business leads. Where does one start?
The two analogies that spring to mind when I look at lead generation is fishing and detective work. Firstly if you are going fishing you would want to know what fish you want to catch, and where you need to go to fish for them and finally in our fishing analogy you would need to use the right bait to catch them. And in detective work you everyone is a suspect however you need clues to reveal the real suspects.
Before you can find new customers and increase sales, you need to understand who your customer is, what value proposition you offer to customers, and what your competition is currently offering in the market and where there are gaps for a new entrant.
The first place to start is to define your ideal customer ? what does your ideal customer look like?? Here are the steps to identify your ideal prospect:-
Step 1 Identify Your Best Customers
List your best customers. People you have sold to, not prospects. Use your definition of best, you set the criteria. Start with your single best customer first then number two and so on.
Step 2 List Your Best Customers Characteristics
List the characteristics that are common to and unique to the best customers you have identified. For Example: Industry, Size, Turnover, Defined need for your Product or Service, Committed to Quality, Win/Win Relationship.
Step 3 Create Your Ideal Customers Profile
Define the standards against which your customers should be measured. Study the list of characteristics; these are your ideal prospects.
Where will you find the ideal prospect?? In Sales 2.0 the internet and social media plays a major part in finding your prospects. For B2C Facebook is one place to build your ?tribe.? Tribe is a word from the title of a well-received book by Seth Godin who describes a tribe as follows; ?The world has always been orga?ni?sed into tri?bes, groups of peo?ple who want to (need to) con?nect with each other, with a lea?der and with a move?ment. ?The pro?ducts, ser?vi?ces and ideas that are gai?ning currency fas?ter than ever are ones that are built on a tribe.?
One place to build a tribe for B2C Facebook is one place to build your tribe, whilst for B2B business LinkedIn is the place. There is not space in this article to discuss all aspects of Facebook and LinkedIn, my friend Bill McCartney delivers excellent workshops how to use both these Social Medias to build a following.
Having discovered your ideal prospect and having built a list of new prospects the time has come to engage with them and make a face to face appointment. However before you reach that stage you need to warm up the cold call through lead nurturing.
Lead nurturing is a process by which leads are tracked and developed into sales-qualified leads, though content delivery via direct mail, email, blogs, YouTube, webinars etc., it is a process of building brand awareness, nurturing the prospect to become ?ready and worthy of a salesperson?s time. Research reveals that it takes five to six touches to warm ?up the cold prospect and in doing so you will need to deliver your value proposition. I plan in a future article to write on how you can easily build a value proposition and a business building prompter to engage with your prospects.
Let me finish with this adage, ?a salesperson with no prospects has no prospects!?
Colly Graham is recognised as leading international sales trainer, look out for his three half-day workshops on Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing, call Colly on 0800 328 0702
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