Brian O’Neill, Negosentro.com | A salesperson’s most valuable commodity is time. Whether your closing percentage is 10 percent, 20 percent or 30 percent, you cannot afford to waste time chasing down bad leads.
Unfortunately, pursuing dead end leads is one of the most common time wasters among sales professionals, which is why even the best of them are always on the lookout for better prospecting techniques. The infographic below, the Sales Prospecting Checklist, lists a number of techniques and details that, when put together into a prospecting system, will help save you time, improve your closing percentage, and improve your results.
The key — and why the infographic is structured as a step-by-step process — is that applying just a few prospecting techniques to your work haphazardly doesn’t accomplish much. For instance, if you are spectacular at scheduling to make prospecting time but are calling on the wrong list of prospects, you’re prospecting results will go sideways or backward, not up. Or, even if you are doing everything right on the technical side but fail to get yourself mentally ready to prospect, you’ll have a very hard time making headway.
For this reason, the last section of the infographic, which addresses motivation and attitude, may be the most important part of the prospecting system. As all sales people know, the sales profession is a mix of science and art. The “science” part — creating lists, scheduling work, research, etc. — can be boiled down to a set of steps that are really best practices everyone can and should follow.
Motivation and attitude, however, depend a lot on you, on your personality. So while the infographic provides excellent suggestions, don’t be afraid to experiment and find your own pre-prospecting motivational routine. It could make the difference between being good and great. Take a look at the infographic here:
Supplied by: Sales Empowerment Group
Author bio: CEO & President Brian O’Neill and Sales Empowerment Group have helped the most innovative, fastest-growing businesses and Fortune 500 companies with sales recruiting, sales training, sales consulting, inside sales and a unique program called “The Interim VP of Sales Program.” O’Neill is also the author of three books available on Amazon.
