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5 Tips to Improve Your Sales Approach When Recognizing Prospects

Written by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith

Article Overview: How do you recognize a prospect or what I prefer to call a potential customer? These 5 tips may help both improve your sales approach and increase sales.

5 Tips to Improve Your Sales Approach When Recognizing Prospects

How do you recognize a prospect or what I prefer to call a potential customer? Do you send out direct mail to a targeted list? Maybe you believe that everyone is a viable purchaser of your products or services?

For some experienced sales professionals, they have pre-deteremined qualifying criteria including:

1. Having a need either expressed or not expressed
2. Having a designated budget
3. Having a decision maker
4. Having urgency

However for some in business, their sales approaches fail to recognize a potential customer. This is because they are so focused on closing the sale instead of earning it. This behavior leads them to the first reason that being doing a lot of telling and consequently the end up not selling.

The second reason for this failure is because these sales professionals are engaged in sales or product based marketing. What ends up happening is the square peg in the round hole.

Reason number three is product based marketing behaviors focus on the product or the service and failure to recognize that the potential customer (a.k.a. prospect) requires something else to meet current needs.

This leads to reason number four of allowing existing beliefs to drive current behaviors. How many times do we believe that if something worked numerous times successfully it should continue to do so? This gives the sales professionals a false sense of security.

Finally, because of these previous four reasons, the self-leadership skill set of active listening is not actively engaged. Clarity around the communication is clouded and hence miss communication happens.

To recognize a potential customer suggests that you may need to become aware of your existing beliefs, stop talking, start listening and realize a new solution may be required. By changing your behaviors and ultimately your sales approach, you will increase sales.

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Article Tags: active listening, budget, clarity, decision maker, direct mail, experienced sales, failure, false sense of security, leadership skill, li li, nbsp, new solution, purchaser, reason number, sales approaches, sales professionals, self leadership, sense of security, square peg, urgency



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Business Tips - How about: Tips for managers to handle employees more effectively? Tips on how to deal with difficult customers? Tips on how to deal more effectively with suppliers? The only three I have in mind right now, but will try to come up with something else. Chris
Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing
Simple way to avoid Cold Calling - Gary, A chiropractor I work with hates cold calling (me too!) and he uses a technique to warm people up to using his services - it's so simple! In Sales your dealing with 3 pools of people: 1. Strangers 2. Prospects 3. Returning Customers You need to move people from one pool to the next. We'll concentrate on #1 and #2 as it's most relevant to your question. My Clients does the following (you just have to tailor it to your situation - be creative). My Client (we'll call him Bob) Bob leverages his time and resources to only get people that need his offer (pain relief) to put their hand up. Dealing with Strangers can get expensive and they don't like to be told what to do as they have no trust or relationship built with him. So to get Strangers to put their hands up he writes up an offer with a free report on a particular pain relief - let's say lower back pain (note: he can simply just change lower back pain to neck pain and have a new report). and uses multiple marketing vehicles to promote the Free report - magazines, newspaper, forums, postcards, private clinics etc. The only people picking up this information are the very people Bob would like as customers as they have Lower back pain. Bob's Free report ends with him stating his services and includes a Free in-house Consultation with no obligation. You'd be surprised at how easily Bob converts Strangers into Prospects. Note: They become prospects when they ask for the Free Guide and in exchange provide their contact details. This gives Bob unlimited opportunity to contact them for the Free in-house consultation with no obligation to continue using him. At this stage Bob's ability to close the sale lies in his office providing good customer service, Bob's ability to help the prospect and provide value at the free in-house consultation. Notice, he hasn't had to pick up the phone to COLD-CALL his Stranger pool or his Prospect pool. Hope that example helps to increase your prospecting!
Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
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