Qualifying the Prospect

There are a variety of popular proprietary approaches to prospect qualifying—in fact, if you Google “qualifying prospects,” you will discover that an incredible number of marketing and sales consulting firms would love to take your money to show you their miracle solution! There are also a variety of acronyms that can be handy for salespeople to use in remembering prospect qualifying elements. For example, the “MADDEN” test determines:

• • Does the prospect have Money?
• • Is the prospect Approachable?
• • Is there a Desire to purchase?
• • Is he or she the actual Decision maker?
• • Is the prospect Eligible to purchase—for example, has he or she already committed to someone else?
• • Does the prospect have a demonstrated Need?

In truth, any and all effective prospect qualifying approaches have several elements in common, which we’ve summarized for you below in the form of five basic qualifying questions along with an explanation of the scope of each element.

1. Does the potential prospect appear to have a need for your product or service? This criterion is fundamental. You have already learned that relationship-building approaches to selling don’t involve arm-twisting, hard-sell techniques. You want to do business over the long run and eventually gain referrals (leads) from current happy customers about potential new customers. Thus, success in selling depends on understanding that what you sell can satisfy a potential buyer’s needs.
2. Can the potential prospect derive added value from your product in ways that you can deliver? This criterion is closely related to #1. In chapter 3 you saw a number of ways beyond price and the product itself that a seller can add value for customers. To answer this question accurately, you must analyze the different ways you might do this with a potential customer. The more ways you can add value, the more likely you have a good prospect. Unless you are in a purely commodity business and everything hinges just on price, getting a fruitful answer to this question can be make or break.

3. Can you effectively contact and carry on communication/correspondence with the potential prospect? Contact and communication with potential customers might seem easy, but this is actually a very important point. Some customers look good on paper but are not really accessible. The potential customer’s geographic location and your ability to get an appointment with him or her fall within this criterion. Opposite, some customers loathe face-to-face contact with sellers and want to do business primarily electronically. For them, skillful use of smartphones and social media options can be the key. Consider what type of contact is needed to develop the relationship.

   Here’s a caution if you’re a younger generation salesperson. Older generation customers are much more likely to want to talk to you by phone or even see you in person before they decide to do business with you. While your preference may be all things virtual, you have to adapt to them and you can’t expect them to suddenly become Twitter-savvy to suit you! Bottom line: if access and communication lines are significant barriers, then it may be wise to move to another prospect.

4. Does the potential prospect have the means and authority to make the purchase? Quite often, as you learned in chapter 2 in the discussion of buying centers, a wide variety of people contribute to the ultimate purchase decision in B2B. The salesperson must determine (a) if the person being considered as a potential prospect can and will make a purchase, and (b) how much effort and investment might be needed to see the purchase through to completion.

   Xerox pioneered a sales training package Xerox PSS (for “Professional Selling Skills”). One of its classic training role plays partners a salesperson with a buyer to try to make a sale. The script (each player reads only the script for his or her role) gives the person playing the salesperson the task of making initial entry into the buyer’s firm to present a new product. Unfortunately, the person role-playing the buyer is told in the script that he or she has no authority to buy and cannot do anything to further the relationship until the salesperson starts to ask questions relevant to means and authority to make the purchase. Most salespeople participating in the role play never solve the dilemma. Sadly, this is a common problem in qualifying prospects.

5. Does the potential prospect have the financial capability to make the purchase? This issue is directly related to #4. Obviously, little is to be gained by pursuing a potential customer who does not have access to the money needed to buy what you sell. Thus, an important criterion is determining the prospect’s financial status. The credit department of your firm may perform this role, or you may have to personally investigate the prospect’s financial strength. It is far better to determine in advance that a prospect cannot afford to buy than to waste time pursuing someone who ultimately will not become your customer for this very straightforward reason.

Qualifying prospects effectively is fundamental to success in selling. It often involves ranking leads according to their attractiveness. A-level prospects might be most attractive and most worthy of pursuit by the sales force, B-level prospects next, and C-level prospects last. Global Connection provides insights on four categories of prospects and how a salesperson might best prepare for each.

The overall process of moving from leads to prospects to customers is often portrayed as an upside-down triangle (see Exhibit 6.1). There are many, many leads, fewer leads that can be successfully qualified as prospects, and ultimately many fewer committed customers.

A CRM system as described in chapter 5 can be of great help in tracking, prioritizing, and qualifying leads. The database aspect of CRM provides bountiful information on potential customers that is readily available to anyone with a tablet, laptop, or (more and more) a smartphone. Today’s successful salesperson is “plugged in” all the time by multiple synchronized devices, and with the power of a CRM system such as Salesforce (formerly referred to as Salesforce.com) can have at his or her fingertips the very information necessary for making these decisions. Obviously, and as we cautioned in chapter 5 on technology, the quality of the decisions will only be as good as the quality of the information used to make them.

Before we explore various specific sources of leads in detail, first let’s ensure we understand why effective prospecting is so important to success in selling.

Exhibit 6.1 From Leads to Customers

Why Prospecting Is So Important

Think of prospecting, pursuing leads that you hope will develop into customers, as a way to fill your pipeline of future business. Today’s business generated by current customers is well and good, but a salesperson always has to be thinking ahead to where business will come from next week, next month, and even next year. Prospecting is not a haphazard or part-time process in selling. Truly great salespeople are always engaged in prospecting in one form or another. They always have their sights set on where tomorrow’s business is coming from.

Now you may be thinking: if we truly are engaged in relationship selling as we described it in chapter 1, shouldn’t we be able to relax some on prospecting? After all, doesn’t the act of developing long-term relationships with our customers ensure they will stay loyal and provide business to us over and over for years? Why do we need to worry about getting new customers all the time? These are good questions with important answers. Yes, of course developing long-term relationships with your customers goes a long way toward sustaining your business. And keeping your current profitable customers is usually much more cost-effective than finding new ones. But all sales organizations are continually working to find new clients, take customers away from competitors, and build their market share. The lifeblood of business success is growth, from both existing customers and new ones.

Beyond this general growth perspective, below are a few other circumstances that may make prospecting for new customers an even higher priority.

• • A customer gets into financial difficulty or goes out of business entirely. This can be quite unpredictable, as with a number of financial institutions during the credit crunch and mortgage bust that began in the late 2000s. If you have developed a long-term vendor relationship with a firm that is in financial trouble and have not also been engaged in prospecting for new customers, you may find yourself in as much trouble as your client.
• • Your main contacts in the client firm leave or change positions. This may result in a change in the relationship. If the result is not favorable for you, ongoing prospecting can buffer any business losses from that client.
• • Your firm needs to increase revenues to pay for expansion or other items. In such cases, the compensation and rewards system of your firm may be altered so that salespeople are paid more for prospecting and securing new customers than for developing and maintaining existing ones. Chapter 13 discusses linking sales force rewards with desired outcomes.
• • A customer moves to a new location outside your area of sales responsibility. In this case, the business may simply move to another salesperson in your company, but you will need to find replacement business for yourself. Prospecting ensures a ready pool of potential new customers.

In sum, prospecting is a key activity of successful selling. How leads are developed (from which prospects and ultimately customers are derived) is the topic of the next section.

Loyal Customers

What better source of leads than existing customers, those who are loyal to you and your company and who are satisfied with your products and the service they have been receiving from you? Sometimes a loyal customer may give you a lead without being asked. More often, however, you will need to ask. This is a normal process of communication with your customers and you should not feel uncomfortable asking. This process is called getting a referral because the customer is referring more business your way. One study found that about 80 percent of customers are willing to provide a referral, but only about 20 percent of salespeople ask for one.²

An idea currently receiving much attention in selling is how to turn loyal customers into “advocates” for you and your business. Customer advocacy means that a customer is satisfied, loyal, and willing to spread the word that he or she is pleased with you. Satisfied customers are an important source of word-of-mouth advertising—a powerful source of leads that have a strong chance of resulting in qualified prospects.

Much of this advocacy through word-of-mouth occurs today through social media websites. Hopefully you and your current customers are on LinkedIn, follow each other on Twitter, and use such means to regularly share hot news flashes, best industry practices, and other value-adding information. A simple Tweet, well placed, can result in a referral! Customer referrals and advocacy are among the best sources of leads. These prospects are likely to meet your qualification criteria.³

Endless Chain Referrals

In an endless chain referral, the salesperson asks an open-end question during each customer contact, such as “Ms. Buyer, who else do you know that would benefit from our products?” When the question is phrased this way, the buyer is free to recommend as many potential prospects as possible. This can be done in person or via most any type of media. Later, when contacting these leads, the salesperson should use the buyer’s name.

Although this method is probably best used when the person giving the referral is in a long-term customer relationship with you, it can and should be used even when the referrer is a prospect who doesn’t buy from you. One way to turn a “no” from a prospective buyer into a win for you that doesn’t cost the customer a thing is to ask for a referral. So always remember to ask for suggestions of potential new customers.

Networking

All salespeople have a variety of contacts. Using these contacts to develop leads is referred to as networking. Network relationships between salespeople and those with whom they interact can take several forms. Also, the communication channels can be by a variety of means, including electronic and non-electronic forms of communication—you the salesperson have to determine what form of communication to best use with each person in your network. Clearly, at this writing, LinkedIn is the social media platform of choice for much professional networking. It provides a straightforward, user-friendly, and widely accepted forum for prospecting. However, just because you favor LinkedIn and similar social media approaches, do not assume that all or even a majority of potential prospects will come from social media. The popular image of today’s salesperson doing all their prospecting online while sipping a drink at their backyard pool is dramatically overstated—you’ve also got to be willing to network in more personal ways when the situation calls for it.⁴

Friends and Relatives. A primary network involves your friends and relatives. Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company encourages new agents to start their networking with this group. The idea is to think of friends and relatives as a core circle of potential leads for prospects and use an endless chain approach to work concentrically out from the core. Northwestern Mutual has shown that, after a few years, successful agents have developed an entirely new set of customers and prospects that are not even directly connected to the core of friends and relatives. But starting with that core group is fundamental to success.

Centers of Influence. People are centers of influence if they are in a position to persuade a salesperson’s potential customers. For example, a salesperson selling sporting equipment to a school system might visit with coaches, trainers, and sports medicine experts to try to win influence over a purchasing agent. These people are analogous to the group we called influencers in the buying center (discussed in chapter 2).

Bird Dogs. No, not the canine kind! In selling, bird dogs (also often called “spotters”) are people who come into contact with an unusually large number of people in the course of their daily routine. Salespeople can use bird dogs as their eyes and ears in the marketplace. For example, a tour operator might ask a bellman at a resort hotel for referrals of promising clients or even compensate the bellman for mentioning the tour guide’s services to guests as they settle into their rooms. Some bird dogs work in client firms. Receptionists tend to hear much of what goes on in an organization. A long-standing rule of selling is to cultivate a rapport with anyone in a firm who is in a position to provide information about the potential for gaining business.

Civic and Professional Groups. One highly useful way of forming networks is to join groups. New agents with State Farm Insurance are encouraged to join Rotary International, Kiwanis, and the like, especially when they enter a new community. The friendships developed there are a terrific source of leads for the agents, and the agents’ membership provides a source of strong goodwill for State Farm in the community. Likewise, if you are engaged in B2B selling, you can seek out primary prospects in industry and professional groups such as trade associations that represent the field you are targeting. And many of these memberships include access to great discussion boards, chat rooms, and even password-protected industry information. Below we mention directories as a particular possibility.

However, a note of caution is in order. Salespeople have been known to overdo it when joining organizations. Some become so tied up in leadership roles with groups that they lose too much valuable time from their core job of selling. Be careful to network selectively, targeting civic and professional groups that you believe will return the most leads for your time and effort invested.

Directories

A variety of directories are available that can serve as lead generators. These directories are most likely accessible as an online download for a fee and are available for most any target customer group imaginable. The usefulness of directories depends heavily on the type of business you are in and the types of clients you are targeting as customers. Many industry groups have their own directories, often published by trade associations and also available are many general directories published by firms such as Moody's, Dun & Bradstreet, Standard & Poor's, and Thomas Register, to name only a few.

Online you will find a variety of specialty directories and listings for sale. It seems that just about every organization has a side business making money by selling its data to sales organizations eager for leads. For example, a local medical society might sell a mailing list or database of all the physicians practicing in a particular geographic area for use by pharmaceutical reps.

Internet

In the age of Google, beyond online directories the Internet is obviously one of the richest (and most convenient) sources of leads for B2B selling. The Internet is used for lead generation in two primary ways. First, salespeople use it to research potential business clients and their industries, with a focus on gathering as much information as possible to try to answer the five qualifying questions for prospects presented earlier.

A second main way salespeople use the Internet for prospecting is by using their company’s own website to generate inquiries from prospects. They either solicit information on a prospect’s needs or make special offers to individuals who respond (probably by email) to a pop-up, banner ad, or other promotional offer or mechanism on the website.

One potential problem with this approach is that, believe it or not, even in the 2010s not every prospect either has access to the Internet on a regular basis or is inclined to use it. This necessitates providing alternate means of contact (such as phone or even fax) for prospects that do not regularly use the Internet. An even more nagging problem is that customer inquiries or requests must be responded to rapidly by the salesperson or another member of his or her firm. If the firm does not have a well-designed way to contact these prospects quickly, it can do more harm than good, since prospects are expecting a prompt response and are not receiving one.

Yet another problem is the growing consumer backlash against aggressive and invasive pop-ups, which are often viewed as detracting from the usefulness of the Internet. Finally, security concerns still linger in electronic commerce, although hopefully this issue will decline in importance as more and more sophisticated security protection continues to be developed. But today, firms must be aware that some percentage of prospects may want to provide contact and other information online (credit, for example) but ultimately fail to do so because of privacy and security concerns.

Email. Email prospecting can be thought of as a subset of using the Internet, expressly for communication purposes. Usually the firm creates or obtains an email list and sends an unsolicited communication to members of the list, with a means for the prospect to reply (by return email, going to a designated website, etc.) The proliferation of email prospecting over the years has led to considerable concern about spam, or junk email messages. Many email users (especially business users) filter the spam out of their email inboxes before they even have a chance to view the messages. Legislation against email spam has been discussed in many countries off and on during the past decade, so far without universal resolution.

Social Media. We’ve already mentioned several forms of social media above in the context of usage with some of the other prospecting sources. Building on what you learned about social media applications in selling in chapter 5, let’s highlight a few particularly effective applications related to prospecting. Remember what prospecting is: pursuing leads that you hope ultimately will develop into customers, as a way to fill your pipeline of future business. And also remember: the key is not to just generate endless lists of people but instead to ensure truly qualified prospects. With this in mind, the activity of finding leads and cultivating them is perfectly matched to the functionality of social media, which aims to develop and nurture communities of various types. LinkedIn is clearly the leader in facilitating the networking and information sharing required in B2B prospecting. Anyone in B2B sales that is not on LinkedIn needs some career counseling! LinkedIn has an easy interface, is well organized, and members’ pages generally contain a wealth of information that can be used to (a) make contact and (b) begin the process of qualifying prospects.

Younger generation salespeople in particular are highly likely to come into the job already an old pro at Facebook, and certainly Facebook offers some of the same information potential as LinkedIn. The big difference, of course, is that Facebook pages also tend to include an enormous amount of more personal information and communication and is thus less focused on and less suited specifically for B2B prospecting. However, don’t discount the power of Facebook in this regard; many firms regularly scan its postings for topical and other qualifiers that can lead to an effective first contact in prospecting. Twitter has different aims from Facebook and LinkedIn, and the ability to “follow” anyone in the community can provide some great insights for sales organizations savvy enough to mine the vast data in Twitter for prospecting purposes. For the individual salesperson, other applications like Google+, Tumblr, Instagram, and Flickr have differing capabilities and all offer opportunities to mine the information in them in search of leads.

Although blogs and discussion boards may seem a little “yesterday” compared to the media above, the truth is that they also can be a rich source of information for B2B leads. For example, blogging allows salespeople to further expand their network outside of their own organization. Blogging provides an outlet through which a salesperson can add value and establish a reputation as an expert in a particular area. This engenders greater trust in that salesperson on the part of current and potential customers. Leads who engage through blogs in a sense are indicating one way in which they can be communicated with which in turn helps the salesperson to further qualify their viability as potential customers.⁵

Telemarketing

Many firms support their salespeople through telemarketing. Telemarketers are frequently referred to as inside salespeople to denote that they do not call on clients face to face. In this context, salespeople that do call on clients in person are commonly called outside salespeople.

Outbound telemarketing involves unsolicited phone calls to leads in an attempt to qualify them as prospects. Because of past abuse by some unscrupulous firms, in the U.S. strict federal guidelines and regulations have been adopted about when telemarketers can call. Opt-out lists (also referred to as do-not-call lists) are available to ensure prospects do not receive such calls at all. Firms that ignore opt-out preferences of customers risk heavy penalities. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is the key agency regulating telemarketing. The FTC website provides up-to-date information on telemarketing regulations. Other countries have rapidly adopted their own versions of anti-telemarketing laws. The declining reputation of outbound telemarketing, the resultant regulation and litigation, and especially the opt-out lists have drastically reduced the effectiveness of outbound telemarketing as a prospecting tool over the past decades. In particular, in some countries regulations have increasingly cracked down on unsolicited calls and (and texts) to smartphones. Ethical Dilemma explores the challenge of do-not-call lists and their limitations on the usefulness of telemarketing as a prospecting tool.

Outside salespeople, especially in B2B markets, often prospect by phone themselves rather than relying on mass telemarketing. This approach has the distinct advantage of allowing the salesperson to hear potential prospects’ responses, favorable and unfavorable, firsthand. It also helps minimize the time and information gap between prospect identification and initial sales call.

Inbound telemarketing refers to responses from inside salespeople to inquiries from prospects that were generated by any means (advertising, social media, etc.). Inbound telemarketing holds promise for prospecting because, like websites, inbound telemarketing gives prospects a way to receive more information directly from a sales organization. As with other approaches, the key to success with this method is to ensure timely response by the inbound telemarketer to customer inquiries. If the prospect appears promising, depending on how the sales force is organized, the inside salesperson may go ahead and pursue the sale or may turn the prospect over to an outside salesperson to pursue the client further.

Written Correspondence

Can you believe that, in the second decade of the 21^st Century, salespeople may choose to prospect via actual written correspondence with potential customers? Before you completely discount written correspondence as a dinosaur, consider that often a salesperson can differentiate his or her communication with clients from competition by occasionally employing a personal written letter or note. This approach is especially appreciated with older generation buyers and can be received as a pleasant surprise in this age of all things electronic.

One form of written correspondence that often is not so well received nowadays is an unsolicited mass direct-mail campaign by the firm. This type of prospecting, often called junk mail, can appear to be personalized but most receivers easily see through it as a mass mailing. This type of prospecting simply plays the odds and has the advantage of volume. It takes extremely large numbers of bulk mailings to generate reasonable numbers of leads.

Trade Shows

Most people are familiar with trade shows, major industry events in which companies doing business in a particular industry gather together to display their new products and services. Such events are usually held annually or semiannually. Examples include the annual housewares show in Chicago and the annual consumer electronics show in Las Vegas.

Trade shows provide leads in several ways. First, the listing of participants can be quite rich in terms of developing potential prospects. Generally, the leads developed at a trade show are later forwarded to the various salespeople responsible for making the next contact. Second, general networks can be developed and enhanced through contacts made at trade shows. And finally, there are opportunities to actually sell, as customers come by your booth to view and learn about your new products.

Conferences

Some sales organizations create their own conferences or other events to provide a forum for prospecting. Typically such conferences combine information sessions with social outings, and they are usually held in attractive locations. The global pharmaceutical industry historically has been a leader in sponsoring medical conferences in which physicians learn about new research findings and oncoming new medications. Because of concern about the ethics of having medical professionals potentially beholden to a particular pharmaceutical firm, many countries have clamped down on such events by limiting the ability to claim expenses from such conferences against their annual tax bill.

Cold Calls and Warm Calls

Classic cold calls, also referred to as canvassing, usually means the salesperson telephones or goes to see potential prospects in person, without invitation. Historically, many salespeople dislike cold calling. In many industries it is discouraged nowadays because it is very expensive to call on individuals whose likelihood of purchase is unknown. This is not to say that if you find yourself in a remote city with some extra time, a personal visit cold call on an interesting prospect company might not be worthwhile as a fact-finding mission. Such junkets often provide invaluable information (and sometimes surprises) that can lead to the development of a business relationship.

On the other hand, warm calls are a prospecting approach in which the salesperson makes a personal visit or phone call based on some pre-work in leads qualifying via one of the other sources of prospects discussed in this section. So much more information is available from these sources that, in many firms in the B2B space, cold calling is virtually obsolete.

Others in Your Firm

Chapter 2 highlighted the trend toward the use of cross-functional teams in selling and chapter 3 discussed the intertwined roles of selling and marketing in modern organizations. These trends bring to light an important issue—prospecting by people in your firm other than salespeople. To the extent various support personnel, engineers, design people, and especially marketers and executives are out in the marketplace interacting with customers, they can employ the same approaches to lead generation and prospecting as salespeople. For this approach to provide any benefits, the firm must have a formal mechanism in place by which prospecting information collected by nonsales personnel can be recorded and disseminated to the sales force. Typical CRM systems allow for easy entry of such information into a database.

Then, too, mass-market advertising, public relations and publicity campaigns, and sales promotion methods also generate leads. A salesperson may get a text, Tweet, email, or call from a potential prospect responding to such promotion yet never know what generated the call. CRM systems typically require that, when such an unsolicited call is received, the salesperson ask the source of the referral and enter it into the system. Truly integrated CRM systems accumulate this information and distribute it back to the marketing department to show the effectiveness of various promotional initiatives (more leads generated means a more successful promotion).

Make the Best Use of CRM in Prospecting

By now you can see how useful CRM systems are in supporting your prospecting activities. Here are two keys to success.

• • Know your system. Learn all you can about it. Understand its capabilities to help you as a salesperson.
• • Use your system. Consider yourself very fortunate to have available a comprehensive tracking system for customers—a couple of decades ago salespeople tracked most everything by making written entries! Today, the recipe for successful selling likely is three parts great selling skills and two parts information technology and personal management skills.

Resist Call Reluctance

Chapter 2 examined buyer and seller roles. Although exceptions do exist, sellers are the ones usually expected to initiate customer relationships. Yet sometimes salespeople resist prospecting because (of all the activities required in successful selling) it is the one that may involve making cold calls. Salespeople must overcome this call reluctance if they are going to succeed.

There are many reasons for call reluctance. Most of them involve a lack of confidence in one’s ability to perform the task.⁶ The key is what to do about it. Much of the solution to call reluctance comes from effective training and support by management. Sales managers can help tremendously by employing the following approaches.

• • Use role plays and exemplar videos to show various aspects of prospecting and potential prospect responses, as well as effective salesperson handling of questions and objections.
• • Prospect together—salesperson and manager—until the salesperson is fully comfortable with the prospecting role.
• • Set realistic goals. When we said that effective goals should be attainable, the point was not trivial. When sales managers set ridiculously high goals for converting prospects to clients, salespeople are bound to get discouraged and may even leave the company.
• • Train salespeople to view prospecting as a numbers game. They must understand that to have a continuous pipeline of customers, a salesperson must continuously seek out new prospects.
• • Keep as your target finding prospects who can become valued long-term clients. You already know the benefits of simultaneously cultivating current good customers and prospecting for new ones.

Establish Goals for the Initial Sales Call

It is amazing how many salespeople call on clients without setting specific goals for what they want to accomplish in the call. This is not professional, nor does it make good use of your client’s valuable time (or your time). Like goals for prospecting, goals for the sales call must be specific, measurable, and attainable. They must take into account your firm’s goals, your own goals as a salesperson, and the client’s goals.⁷ Use your judgment as to how much you can accomplish in one sales call—especially the first one, where you and the customer are just getting to know each other. Salespeople tend to map out in advance goals across several planned sales calls with a client. The nature and scope of your goals will vary depending on your business and the client. Some sample goals for a first sales call might be:

• • To have the prospect agree to a demonstration of your product.
• • To have the prospect agree to contact several of your references.
• • To have the prospect initiate the process in his or her firm to allow your company to be set up as a vendor.
• • To set up another appointment to address specific issues brought out in the initial sales call.

Note that none of these goals involves actually making a sale. If getting an order on the first sales call is realistic, then by all means set that goal. As time goes by and your relationship with a customer blossoms, you and the client can work together on mutual goal setting to build each other’s business.

Learn All You Can about the Prospect

If you are engaged in B2B selling, you must pay attention to both professional and personal aspects of the potential customer. Some of the sources used in your prospecting research can serve you well here. You can turn to the Internet for more information on the professional (company) side. Other sources of information on the prospect and his or her company are noncompeting salespeople in your network who have been calling on the firm and members of the firm’s buying center whom you can contact comfortably before the sales call. Exhibit 6.3 lists sample items you can research before making an initial sales call.

The idea is to obtain enough information to match yourself and your company to your prospect’s situation and needs right from the very first sales call. It is also important to avoid mistakes such as mispronouncing a buyer’s name or not knowing the client firm is going through a merger. Missing such major personal or professional aspects gives a very poor first impression.

Plan to Portray the Right Image

Image is important in forming a good first impression. In most cases, the first real impression you make on a prospect occurs when you meet him or her in your first face-to-face sales call. You can lay the groundwork for an excellent impression by sending written materials in advance along with a professional cover letter or email, or by being very professional when you set up the sales call appointment by phone. Planning the right image includes two key aspects: deciding what type of presentation to prepare and deciding what to wear for the sales call. Chapter 7 provides more on first impressions and image in the discussion about the approach.

Type of Presentation. Chapters 7 and 8 provide considerable detail about how to get ready for a great presentation as well as various sales presentation strategies. For now, you need to know that you actually decide what type of presentation you want to make at the preapproach stage. Here are some key issues to consider.

• • How much technology should I employ in the sales call, and what types (PowerPoint, laptop, etc.)?
• • How formal should the presentation be?
• • How long should I allow for the presentation? How long for Q&A?
• • What materials should I send the prospect in advance, how should I send them, and what should I bring with me?

To answer these questions, you must learn as much as you can, in advance, about the prospect’s preferences. If you have trouble determining critical answers from your research, it is perfectly acceptable to directly query the prospect or his or her gatekeeper about preferences, either by phone (perhaps when you make the appointment), by follow-up letter, or by email.

Your goal at the preapproach stage should be to ensure you can show up at the prospect’s office with the confidence of knowing that what you have prepared will be comfortable for the prospect, be a good fit to his or her style, and have the highest possible likelihood of gaining a favorable reaction. Bottom line: a great first impression!

Grooming and Attire. Grooming, or general personal cleanliness and professional appearance, is a given in professional selling. You must look the part of a competent, trusted business partner to succeed. Unclean fingernails, unkempt hair, and the like tell the prospect you are not playing in the professional leagues. People with poor grooming habits will not be successful in sales. In addition, visible tattoos and body piercings are still not generally accepted in most areas of professional B2B selling.

Attire is less dogmatic than grooming for several reasons. Of course you don’t want your clothing to appear sloppy and unkempt, and you don’t want unusual jewelry or accessories to distract from your sales message. However, many firms have shifted to business casual all the time, so you can choose whether to match that attire or dress up to a more professional image. Here are a few tips:

• • If the client suggests dressing in business casual, do so.
• • When in doubt, dress up to business attire.
• • When you do the preapproach, ask the prospect or gatekeeper about the dress code.
• • Never dress down below the client’s level of attire.

Following these simple rules will ensure your first impression is enhanced, not hurt, by the way you are dressed.

Determine Your Approach

The approach means how you are going to contact the prospect initially to set up an appointment and begin the dialogue. Part of the preapproach is assessing options for the approach itself. Often the telephone is used, although other viable options include email, letter, or even an initial in-person interview. Your preapproach research should help you determine which of these is most appropriate for use with your particular prospect. Chapter 7 provides more information on making the approach.

Prepare a Sales Proposal

An excellent way to plan out the sales process in advance is through the use of written sales proposals. A sales proposal formalizes much of what we have learned in this chapter and focuses on the value proposition. It provides an effective means to approach the prospect. The research, time, and energy you put into this preparation at the preapproach stage will pay off in multiple ways during the sales call.

Chapters 6–10 are designed to systematically guide you through the entire sales process—prospecting and sales call planning; communicating the sales message; negotiating for win-win solutions; closing the sale and follow-up; and self-management. In practice, salespeople often plan out this process in advance through the use of written sales proposals that are provided to clients prior to making a sales call. Preparing a sales proposal accomplishes two important functions: (1) It forces the salesperson to formalize much of the advanced planning discussed in this chapter—the things that need to be done before going face to face with a buyer; and (2) it focuses the dialogue between buyer and seller on the value proposition from the very beginning, thus laying the groundwork for an effective long-term buyer–seller relationship. Sales proposals are an exceptionally professional way to impress a potential customer.

Let’s briefly take a look at the four key components of a professional sales proposal.

• • Seller Profile. Includes introductory information on you as the salesperson, your firm, and the products you foresee ultimately discussing with the buyer.
• • Critical Questions to Be Addressed. You will learn in chapter 7 that a great way to establish initial communication with your buyer is through the use of well-reasoned, insightful questions. Asking the right questions will show the buyer that you have done your homework and are prepared for the sales call. One approach to using effective questions is a technique called SPIN selling, which will be described further in chapter 7.
• • Outline the Features, Advantages, and Benefits (FAB) of the Product. Buyers today are very busy and pressed for time. They appreciate succinct, to-the-point information about sellers’ offerings. One convenient way to provide what they need is through the FAB approach, which is also described in chapter 7.
• • Provide a Value Analysis in Financial Terms. In chapter 3 and its Appendix you learned about the importance of conveying a strong value proposition in relationship selling. A key part of a sales proposal is quantifying for the buyer the value of doing business with you.

In this chapter, we built a strong case for the importance of taking time to do good prospecting and a thoughtful preapproach. The groundwork laid during these activities ensures a strongly favorable first impression with a buyer and pays off by getting the overall relationship off to a great start. Think of a sales proposal as a natural bridge between the prospecting/preapproach and the actual approach to the buyer. A sales proposal formalizes what you have learned during the analysis stage and presents an initial inquiry to a buyer in a way that will hopefully lead to the opportunity to meet with him or her in person. The next chapter prepares you for that in-person sales call.