Sales Prospecting Made Simple

Sales prospecting is a task which most engineers tend to couple with cold calling.

Today I am going to suggest to you that in fact cold calling and sales prospecting are two very different things.

Cold calling is almost always a bad idea. Sales prospecting is almost always a very good idea.

Why is that?

Cold Calling v Sales Prospecting

Cold calling is a bad idea because it is very wasteful of your most precious resource viz your time. You don't know anything about the people you're calling.

Sales prospecting, done properly, is the process of pre-qualifying your prospects. Are the people whom you are about to call on - whether they are existing customers or not, whether they have been referred by a happy customer or not - are they people who have a burning problem for which you have the ideal solution?

If not, then you have no reason to make the call and you should be out there searching for someone with whom you could spend your pitch time more effectively.

But How to Separate the Wheat from the Chaff?

Your big problem, of course, is how do you find out which people have a problem without speaking to them first? Obviously, you can't; not 100%. However, it's much easier to qualify-out people who definitely don't meet your criteria.

After that initial process of elimination, sorting the sheep from the goats is a matter of skill, not luck. To sharpen up your skills in that area Click Here