Prospecting For Business

Many small companies start out by selling their products, services or solutions to existing contacts, and continue to grow the business by referrals. That's fine but in most cases there will be peaks and troughs and referrals alone won't be enough to enable the company to reach its full potential.



To cope with the troughs and grow the business beyond a certain point entails making contact with people you don't currently know and persuading enough of them to buy from you.

This is often where it starts to become uncomfortable because the core ability of your key people is to devise and provide the products, services or solutions, not sell them 'cold'. Consequently the idea of prospecting for new business can be a bit daunting and there's a tendency to use the need to meet the demands of existing customers as a reason for not having time to undertake prospecting activities as well.



That's understandable but let's be honest, unless you...



a) Have so much profitable work via referrals both currently and lined up well into the foreseeable future.

b) Are a networker par excellence, known throughout your industry, with people coming to you begging to do business with you.

c) Or are deliberately winding the company down.

...Your company will need to undertake prospecting activities if you want to grow the business. In fact it will probably need to undertake prospecting just to stand still. One reason for this is that there will be times when you lose business through no fault of your own.

Think about it:

A project you've geared up resources to work on progresses so far then gets indefinitely halted; a contract that you've had for several years suddenly isn't renewed; a competitor comes up with a superior or cheaper alternative; the list is potentially endless.

How well placed is your business to weather one or more of these hits? Is your prospecting activity like a well-oiled machine that you can rev up or slow down according to the needs of the business at any given time? Or is it more like a knee jerk reaction to external influences and events?

You need a plan, a scaleable routine and an approach that works for your company, in your industry and your marketplace. And you need the research, contact marketing and sales skills to enable you to:

1) Accurately 'read' what your market wants.



2) Convincingly communicate how your offer meets those requirements better than any of your competitors'.

At some point you're going to have to get to grips with mastering the use of a tool that many people have a real problem with in terms of sales and marketing activities...

Use of the telephone in prospecting:

The telephone itself is just a tool, albeit a potentially very powerful one. And, like any other powerful tool, it can be used by those who don't know what they're doing and cause a lot of damage. Equally, used carefully and intelligently it can produce spectacular results.

Some people dread prospecting via the telephone - so much so that they’d rather not engage in this activity at all or else hive it off and pay someone to make outbound telephone sales calls on their behalf.

A peculiar thing about this attitude is that, as you can see from the above comments, those same people who hate making these prospecting calls will usually, more or less quite happily:

a) Deal with an inbound telephone enquiry.

b) Attend a new business meeting on behalf of their company.

c) Give a presentation.

d) Man an exhibition stand.

e) Introduce themselves to someone they’ve never met before at a networking event or party.

So, tell me please: What’s the main difference and why this big problem with proactively using the telephone to help effect a sale? Learn to do it well and you’ll be streets ahead of the competition.

Happy prospecting!

This article is an extract from our Comfort Zone Gold course at www.sellingforbusiness.com



Prospecting For Business - To learn more about this author, visit Linda Mattacks's Website.

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