CHAPTER 26

Sell More

The Difference Between Activity and Prospecting

I once read an article about what a salesperson could do to increase sales. The title was something catchy like “A Thousand and One Tips to Increase Sales.” It was hard to argue with the premise. All salespeople can use good advice about how to increase their sales. It’s the reason that I continue to read everything I can about selling. There is always something new to learn.

In this case, this author’s useful quick tips were all about creating more sales activity. He was asking the question, “What should you do if you can’t get potential customers, raw sales leads, to engage?” His recommended steps were intended to create a flurry of sales activity around raw prospects to stimulate engagement, initiate their own buying process, and move forward with the seller.

But is selling the same as sales activity? And if prospects are not yet fully committed to their buying processes, are random sales activities the most effective way to get them engaged?

Arte, a salesperson who once worked for me, was responsible for a large geographic territory. His lead deficit was normally about 50 percent, which meant that a good portion of his sales time was consumed by prospecting. One day he came into my office and announced that he had invented his own method of prospecting that he called SWARM. The acronym stood for Surround With Activity to Regain Momentum. His idea was to envelop his potential prospects in a constant swarm of sales activities such as phone calls, visits, e-mails, voice messages, invitations to webinars and seminars, and product demonstrations in the hope that eventually something would stick.

How’d that work for Arte? Not well. But he got high marks for creativity!

Unfortunately, many salespeople fall into this trap. How many times are you able to contact one of the names on your list on the first attempt? The percentage is fairly small. Or maybe you get through, but contacts tell you to call back in a couple months when they might be interested. This happens all the time. Rarely is the correct response to bombard the prospect with trivial, time-wasting communications and requests.

Sales managers and sales professionals often ask me: “If you had to choose one piece of advice to give me about how to grow sales, what would it be?” My standard answer is, “Sell more.”

I like to illustrate the meaning of “sell more” with a parable about Eckstein, a salesperson for a typical medium-sized business. (Eckstein is a composite drawn from the stories of numerous salespeople I have helped over the years.) Eckstein always had an excuse for everything, including why he would always almost make his numbers but never quite get there. His boss was at a loss, so he summoned me, the sales expert, to analyze the problem.

Observing Eckstein in action was to see a typical salesperson at work. On the surface, it looked as though he was taking the right steps to succeed, and he seemed happy in his work. But something was holding him back from taking his productivity to the next level.

That something was that Eckstein had a problem distinguishing between enough and more. He was like most salespeople in that regard. He always thought he was doing enough to make his numbers and that if everyone else just did their jobs, then he would make his quota. It never occurred to him that the key to unlocking his success was doing more.

If you don’t have enough prospects, then sell more.

The emphasis is on the sell not the more.

It’s not about engaging in random sales activity, which is what gets salespeople like Eckstein stuck into the hole. To sell more means to fill your prospecting time with intelligent, productive, creative, and responsive sales actions that set you apart from your competitors and motivate potential customers to learn more.

What are the goals and desired outcomes of your prospecting activities? The prospecting call—be it a voice call, door knock, networking event, or e-mail—is the same as a regular sales call. Every contact has to be planned. On the very first prospecting contact, your plan has to answer the following questions:

   What do I want to accomplish in this call?

   What do I want the outcome of the call to be in terms of the next steps that the customer will take (such as scheduling a discovery call to learn enough about customers’ requirements to qualify or disqualify them as prospects)?

Here are additional ways to sell more:

   Prospect with existing customers to assess whether they have new requirements for your products and services. The goal is to identify a potential need for additional products. The desired outcome is a meeting to explore a customer’s potential requirements.

   Call existing customers for referrals. The goal is to get the customer’s agreement to provide two referrals. The desired outcome is the customer committing to provide those names to you within two days.

   Go to a networking event. The goal is to make contact with five people whose companies may have a need for your product. The desired outcome is scheduled follow-up meetings with at least three of the five people you met.

   Ask a contact on LinkedIn for an introduction to a mutual connection. The goal is for your contact to make the introduction within 24 hours. (Do this only with people you actually know.)

After exhausting all these resources, if you still have a lead deficit, then you can go out and make some cold calls. But only after you have performed the necessary research and crafted a great killer question.

In my first professional sales job out of college, in the pre-Internet dark ages, I was selling big computers. I had a 100 percent lead deficit. Every day at 8 A.M., when my sales manager would kick me out of the office, I ventured forth to make many, many cold calls in my territory. I have to admit it didn’t come naturally to me, so I developed another approach. Rather than being a generalist, I decided to specialize in selling to a specific vertical: the construction market. This way I could develop an expertise that gave me something concrete to differentiate me. I did not cold call the construction companies in my territory (and there were hundreds of them), but rather I hosted a weekly educational seminar in our branch office for a limited number of construction companies. The program—held every Wednesday—would include a demonstration of our construction management system, and customers seemed to prefer the group setting to dealing with a salesperson one on one. I found potential prospects in business directories, and every Thursday would mail out ten postcards with a handwritten invitation. Then I’d follow up twice: first on Monday morning and again on the morning of the seminar. Within months I had a strong, constantly renewing pipeline—and I was killing my numbers! After a year, I was getting two-thirds of my sales from existing accounts and referrals. But every Thursday, I was still sending out ten postcards, and every Wednesday I was playing host to new prospects (usually one or two per week).

Although it is important to fill every hour with selling, it is more important to do it wisely. Persistently. Creatively.

Your prospecting must have a purpose. Keep in mind the customers’ objective: to gather the information or data required to make an informed purchase decision with the least investment of their time possible. This is not to say that customers won’t spend the appropriate time to purchase a product or service. They just don’t want to invest a minute more than they have to.

The winning salesperson is usually the one who knows how to make that happen—and it often starts with how you prospect.

Sell more. Win more orders. Simple.