Aren’t you forgetting something?

There are a few things I often see salespeople forget when prospecting.

When it comes to the basics, we can’t get sloppy. Are you including these elements when prospecting?

If you want to prospect effectively, follow these tips.

1. Awareness

Is the customer waking up in the morning and saying, “Oh man, I hope Mark Hunter calls me today?” No, my mother doesn’t even do that.

We have to be able to create awareness. You may work for HP, or Coca-Cola. Yes, people recognize your company name, but they don’t recognize you.

That’s why awareness is a critical aspect, and why many cold calling strategies go awry — because they don’t have an ability to create it.

2. Relationship

Imagine we’re having a conversation for the first time, and I try to take you all the way to the close. It’s probably not going to be a very smooth close. I’d venture to say it’s not going to be an optimized close for the customer or for me either, because there’s no relationship there.

Of course, this is different between a big company and a small company. However, within a big company, too many salespeople rely on the relationship, the attitude or the beliefs that the customer has towards the big company. But, they’re dealing with you. You have to be able to create that relationship.

3. (De)Education

Now comes time to educate — or perhaps de-educate.

Many times you’re dealing with the customer’s preconceived notions. They’ve already done their homework, or they’ve been buying from your competitor, and they have all these ideas. Not all of them are correct, true or helpful.

After I de-educate, now I can finally be in a position to educate. Word to the wise: if I try to educate before I de-educate, it goes right over their head.

4. Understanding the Need and the Validation

This is where the proposal gets on the table. See, I’ve gone through these other pieces such as establishing the relationship, growing in awareness, and education. Now, I can seek to further understand the need, scope it out, and validate the need.

I can actually begin to do this in the prospecting phase, because if I don’t understand what your need is, and I don’t understand how you’re going to validate if you’re going to make a purchase or not, why am I dealing with you?

5. Decision

I’ve got to understand their decision-making process. This ensures I get in contact with the right people, not just some gatekeeper or lower-level manager. Ask questions such as:

• What are the criteria you’re going to use to make your final decision?
• How have you decided who to go with in the past?

You might even find out who your competition is from their answers!

Critical Assets Most Salespeople Overlook

There are three critical assets most salespeople overlook: time, mind, and network.

If you get these three things right, it’s amazing what can happen in terms of your success in sales. And really, in any area or field, both professionally and personally.

1. Time

Why is it that some people have the ability to just get more done in a day? Because these people have a seize-the-moment mentality. That means when they have tasks that are five-minute pieces, or one-hour tasks, they understand the things they need to get done today. In fact, they have an ability to compartmentalize them.

Speaking of seize the moment, you may be between a couple of meetings, and you have five minutes. That’s when they throw in one of those five-minute tasks — maybe a phone call, or responding to an email.

They also know their peak time. What’s your peak time of the day in terms of your best ability to get things done? Knowing this allows you to power up, as well as help you in powering down.

I invite you to have a one-minute rule. You see, here’s what drives me crazy. People will say, “Wow, let me just take a few minutes to get this done.” And 30 minutes later, they’re still working on it. Even 45 minutes later, they’re still working on it. What happens is we waste so much time starting and stopping an activity.

That’s why I practice the one-minute rule. Sure, I may have an interruption, but I don’t follow through with it now unless I know I can get it done in less than a minute. Otherwise, it has to wait so I don’t get distracted.

2. Mind

What are the websites that you spend time on during the day?

The reason I bring this up is that your brain remains in the moment with the website long after you’ve left it. It’s always amazing how you watch a television show, or you go on a website and your brain keeps thinking about that after the fact. You see, here’s the whole thing, your brain is a library. Stuff comes in and it asks itself, where do we put this? Where do we go with this? So I need to be careful of what I’m putting into that brain.

How about, am I visual or auditory? Do you retain the spoken word or the written word better? Learn these things, and that’s what you want to maximize.

Organizing your brain is no different than your garage or your basement. What are you keeping around that you should junk? How many times have you pulled into your garage and you see stuff and you think, “Ah, I need to do something with that, I never use it.” It’s the same thing with your mind — there’s stuff in your mind that’s just cluttering it up.

Get rid of that clutter and you’ll be more focused.

3. Network

Your mother was right when she said, “Be careful of whom you hang around with at school.” It’s true, we do become the sum of the five people we associate with the most. So if your mother never told you, I sure will — be careful whom you associate with.

Your network is either an asset or a liability. Careful, your network could be an asset, but you may have people in your network who are liabilities and you’ve got to say, “Hey, I need to be prepared to let those people go.”

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].