Make most of your prospects
Oct 26 2009 by Carole White , The Journal
CONSIDER the lifetime value of a customer. Now it’s time to do some serious prospecting for more. Real selling is finding the new customers.
You must strive to continually bring new customers on board. The life cycle of your current customers will eventually come to an end. Essentially, you need to double your efforts to both fill the gap and grow the business.
Look upon prospecting as recession-proofing your business. Businesses that have positioned themselves well know that because they have essentially ‘spread the risk’ they will survive and often do quite well out of a recession.
They know that many of their competitors won’t have the flexibility they have. These competitors may not survive a downturn, but guess who will be there to pick up clients from them?
Searching for new customers is a logical process. The first step is to analyse your potential market. Make the right contacts. With the best of everything from business to product/service to presentation to service, you are still operating in a numbers game. The more right people you see, the more likely you are to get an order.
Set yourself a target of 10 calls a day. Imagine that one of your prospects needs to place a large order but has lost your phone number. You are merely trying to find out who it was, by calling up and letting the prospects know what you do. The large order is there somewhere it’s just a question of elimination.
As you talk to more and more prospects you will discover key words and phrases that seem to ‘hit the spot’ for your prospects. Collect any gems of information for next time, even if it’s something simple like they have a cold, or were off to their son’s birthday party, referring to that in future will endear you to the prospect. You can use this to build up your intelligence and develop relationships.
Just make sure that you record this information and don’t waste it. These prospecting lists are the backbone of your business, work them well and work them methodically.
Just think of the satisfaction of removing a name from your prospect’s file and transferring it to your active customer database.
If you need help finding new customers, Tedco’s MintFresh Sales service can help, call us on the number below and see how we can help.
If you require any further support or advice please call Tedco on (0191) 428-3535, email starting@tedco.org or visit us at www.tedco.org
Carole White is business support manager, Tedco
