What's Your Sales Approach?

Guest Contributor: David Colomb
David's Posts - David's Blog

I love reading sales blogs on the Internet; you learn a lot about what your competition out there are thinking. I learn things that help me every day in my work, and they also make me think.

One of the discussions that seem to be the most active out there is the discussion of the best way to develop a pipeline of clients, does the salesperson use cold calling, referrals, or networking to get their leads? Everyone seems to believe there is one answer that will work for them every time. I just don't understand or believe that there can be one way that will work for every situation.

I think that as a hunter looking for new clients, I have to have a toolbox of different weapons that will capture different clients. When I sold uniform services, the primary tool and the most successful seemed to be cold calling, you go out with a list of potential businesses that you found on the Internet, and you go door to door, meeting and presenting. The majority of these clients are small business owners, they don't have the time or the inclination to talk with their competition, nor do they go to Chamber mixers or other networking opportunities. The successful salesperson needs to hunt them down to their lair and meet them face to face.

When I sold Commercial Pest Control I was successful in using all three approaches. Apartment complex management could be found in network opportunities such as Management Associations and Chambers, because they used these organizations to market their businesses and to collect information to help them manage their complex. The ancillary benefit to attending these meetings was that you could also get face to face referrals from a happy manager to other managers. Other segments of the market, restaurants and small businesses again need to be cold called, they don't have time to go out in social situations, and they're minding the store, full time.

These examples show that you can't be the person that chooses what will be the successful approach, you need to find out what approach is going to be the one that gets you in front of a qualified lead. Your clients are the ones that will show you how to get their attention. Those salespeople that think that they can become adept at one approach and that this approach will always work for them are fooling themselves. Sometimes I think that salespeople try to simplify things, we always want to have a roadmap that leads to success, and we always want to use this same map, no matter where we're going. Keep it simple seems to be the mantra of sales, and there is certainly a place for that during your presentation, and in your dealing with management, but in finding clients we need to spend the time and effort to think through and find the way to do this.