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Plan Your Prospecting Success |
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Written by Don Cooper
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Wednesday, 24 May 2006 |
Plan Your Prospecting Success
By Don Cooper
Do you have a prospecting plan? If you want to increase your sales, it can be a big help.
A prospecting plan is like a business plan for your sales career. It’s a planning tool that helps you sketch out your goals, your best prospects, where to find them, how to reach them and what action steps you’re going to take.
First, what are your sales goals? Do you want more new customers or more repeat sales to existing customers? Are you trying to break into a new industry? Is it more important to push a new product or revive a sagging performer in your line? Cheap stuff or big-ticket items? When you know what you want to accomplish, it’s easier to do it, because your goals will help define other aspects of your plan.
Second, who are your ideal prospects? (Hint: “everyone” is the wrong answer.) Most salespeople waste a majority of their time with prospects who will never do business with them. To maximize your prospecting time, you want to spend it with the people who are MOST likely to buy from you. Start your profiling by examining your current customers: What do they have in common? Then decide who else you want to target and list their defining characteristics: size, income, age, industry, health status, etc. This doesn’t mean that you will ignore everyone else, because you’ll happily serve someone who doesn’t happen to fit your profile. But your ideal prospects are the people you want to devote most of your time and energy to.
Third, where should you be looking? Whoever your ideal prospects are, you’ll find some of them everywhere. But you want to focus your efforts where the greatest concentrations of them are. For example, if your target market is the elderly, you know that there are large populations of retirees in warm climates like Florida and Arizona. In any given community, you will find concentrations living in retirement centers and assisted living facilities. By contrast, if you’re targeting Generation X’ers, you’ll tend to find them in apartment buildings in urban areas and along the coasts.
Fourth, how will you reach them? You have dozens of prospecting tools at your disposal, including networking, direct mail letters, cold calls, newspaper ads, trade shows, special events, referrals and more. Choose several and use them simultaneously. Don’t despair if you don’t see results immediately. It takes an average of nine “impressions” (anytime a person is exposed to you, your name, your product or your company) to move a prospect from apathy to action. So be persistent in your efforts. And be fanatical about following up with each prospect. The more tactics you employ, the better your results will be.
Finally, what steps are you going to take to achieve your stated goals and in what time frame? This is the most important part of your plan. Unless you commit to taking action, you won’t achieve the goals you’ve set. Schedule what you’re going to do and when, with as much detail as possible. Break each project into incremental steps, with a time line for each one. This will insure that those things get done.
After you’ve written your plan, review it periodically: weekly, monthly or bi-monthly, whatever works for you. Are you on track? How is each prospecting tactic working? Have you forgotten some items? Does the plan need to be revised? Adjust your plan and/or your actions as needed.
A prospecting plan can be a powerful tool in your kit. And the more effort you put into it, the more sales you’ll make.
Don Cooper—“America’s Networking Guru”—is a sales and marketing expert who speaks, writes and consults on how to attract and keep more customers. He is a contributing author of Confessions of Shameless Self Promoters with Debbie Allen and Jay Conrad Levinson. You can contact Don at 303-885-1182 or
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You can also find other articles at www.DonCooper.com.
* 2002 Don Cooper. All rights reserved. This article may be reprinted, intact, as long as the full byline is included. To request a photo to print with the byline, please call 303-885-1182 or e-mail
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