It’s the beginning of your new fiscal sales year, and you probably worked extremely hard to hit last year’s sales goals.You might be feeling exhausted, with nothing left in your tank. You may feel as though you’ve done everything you can with your current customer base, and have realized that you must start your sales and prospecting efforts all over again, with even more dedication to exceed the new sales increase you’ve been given.
For many sales professionals, it’s a double-digit sales increase for this next sales year! As you reflect back, the sales cycle was more like a sales roller coaster, and if you’re like me – you like moving fast, but you don’t like the steep ups and downs of the emotional sales roller coaster.
How would you like to have a more sustainable sales and prospecting plan that will work for the entire fiscal sales year?
Here’s the reality, for sales reps to achieve their sales goal, sales teams can’t rely only on their existing customers.The biggest sales cycle challenge for sales teams is finding potential new customers. You need a sales process to do this.
Most sales reps don’t like cold calling and neither do I! Most sales reps have prospecting procrastination when it comes to making these calls and procrastination never leads to positive sales results.
I’m going to share with you a consistent sales process with a prospecting plan that will help you secure 10 new potential customers this year, by simply making 10 proactive prospecting calls or emails each week to avoid sales prospecting procrastination!
Here are seven strategies you can use to build your Sales and Prospecting Pipeline at a purposeful pace!
Let’s build your prospecting plan in reverse:
7. How many new prospects do you want to turn into new customers this year? How about 10 new customers this quarter or this sales year? That is less than one per month and very do-able! 10 new customers at $10,000 each is $100,000 in new business. How many of those new customers could be $100,000 customers? This would build a great sales pipeline to help you achieve your sales goals for the next three years!
6. How many prospect meetings throughout the sales year do you need to secure 10 new customers? The average sales closing ratio is 1:4 so to gain 10 new customers means you’ll need 40 prospect meetings. That would be on average at least one prospect meeting per week allowing you time to take summer holidays, attend sales conferences and enjoy at least two weeks off during the December holiday season because you will have slam dunked your sales and new customer goal, one year from now.
5. Before we begin creating your hot prospect list, let’s review your current existing sales clients to determine who are the ideal profitable type customers to attract. We all have a few high maintenance customers and we don’t want to attract more of them! Let’s make this easy and do a quick analysis of your top 10 existing customers.
Secure 10 new potential customers this year, by simply making 10 proactive prospecting calls or emails each week to avoid sales prospecting procrastination! Share on XWhat are their sales, who is the key decision maker and what is their role? What is their personality style? What are important criteria that make them successful to work with? What type of organization and what products or services do you sell that are profitable to sell? You want to look for any patterns and trends to help you determine who your ideal type of customers are. To keep this simple, I would suggest narrowing down and focusing only on three to four verticals at the most, which is one per quarter.
4. Build your hot prospect list based on your ideal and profitable type of customer. To create this hot prospect list, there are many sources for you to research such as LinkedIn, Industry Directories, and Industry Associations.
3. In looking at your verticals, identify when their industry tradeshows and conferences take place, as this is a great place to find and meet key decision makers. Put these tradeshows and conferences into your calendar and plan to be there.
2. Once you’ve gathered your list, commit to making 10 prospecting calls every week to achieve your sales goals using your Hot Prospect List.
1. Choose the best time to make those prospecting calls every week and schedule that time in your calendar. We highly recommend either early in the morning or you might try at the end of the day. At Teneo, we are committed to making those prospecting calls or sending emails every Thursday morning between 7:30am to 8:55am, as it has proven to be a great time to reach the right decision maker.
This prospecting strategy is simple and it works.
Avoid Prospecting procrastination this year and simply put your sales goal plan in pace by pro-actively making 10 calls or emails each week to secure 10 new customers this year.
Follow us weekly as we continue to provide you with Purposeful Prospecting tips, strategies and templates you can use every week to help you stay focused on your sales and prospecting goals for this year.
I’m a Goals Junkie – please comment below and share with me your sales and prospecting goals to stay accountable and we’ll continue to help you throughout the year to slam dunk your goals!
Lisa is driven by the mantra – Be Strategic. Be Pro-active. Be Brave. – and has been successfully training and coaching sales leaders and their teams to do the same for over 15 years. As the President of Teneo Results since 2003, she has trained thousands of sales professionals at more than 250 companies across North America. She transitions salespeople away from the standard “product & price” approach to having purposeful business conversations with their customers that drive results.