Sales made easier with a plan

Over the past few years I have discovered first hand and by observation something that others before me knew all along and that was in the sales world a significant ammount of money was lost due to lack of follow up. Last week I wrote the following to my team:

Don’t you hate it when you’ve talked to somebody once or twice about advertising with you and then you hear them on a competing radio station?



Yeah, it bugs me too.



Each of us have a limited amount of time each month.



We need to FOCUS ourselves. How many businesses have you contacted since you started here?



10?

100?

500?





How often have you been in front of them? Face to Face? Phone call? E-mail? Letter? Drop-in with a new idea? Ask them how their wife’s sister who has cancer is doing? Anything?



This point came to me again this week when I was doing an interview with a friend of mine that does 30 cold calls a day for a temp agency. I asked him how often he stays in contact after that first contact. His answer, once or twice a year, maybe. Wrong answer for success.



The reason we do all this prospecting is not to collect business cards, but to find people we want as clients. Let me repeat that. Prospecting is a process we go through to find people/businesses we want as clients.



Do you want to work with 500 different clients? I hope not. How about 10 good clients? If you have 20 good clients, you should be sitting pretty.



The steps to get from where we are today to those 10 or 20 good clients are the steps we need to do now, and next week, and the week after that, etc.



My job is to help you be successful, not just for the week, but for the month, the quarter and the year.



We will do this in bite size chunks.





Then today as I was doing some info gathering for a client I came accross this:

Follow up leads to profit
by Brian Parsley

Salespeople spend a lot of time trying to find new customers. They're cold calling -- trying to get an appointment. After getting the appointment, they spend all of their time working on a proposal -- trying to win the contract. And after getting the chance to do business, maybe even at the expense of any profit -- they lose the deal to a competitor.

The cycle repeats itself every day in sales.

What if it didn't have to happen? What if, instead of cold calling, you were out picking up checks? Instead of telling people about yourself, people were telling others about you?

There's a simple formula that will break the cycle and allow you to not only win the business, but also win the customer's loyalty.

The formula is called Follow-Up.

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