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How to guarantee you have enough prospects in your sales funnel

How do you go about new account prospecting?

Do you have a controlled process that works consistently or is it more of a case of fire fighting when needs must?

If you’re like most small to medium sized businesses it’s definitely closer to fire fighting than anything else. Yet it needn’t be that way.

There are four key stages to developing a prospecting process that really works:

  1. Evaluate skills and resources within your business
  2. Define your ideal customer profile
  3. Build your database
  4. Create a communications strategy to influence your target prospects

1. Evaluate skills and resources within your business

In a large business it is relatively easy to decide who should head up and run new account prospecting. The smaller the business is, however, the harder the task becomes because everyone tends to be working to capacity.

So how, in a smaller business, do you decide who should control the prospecting process?
Should it be the managing director, the sales director/manager, an account manager or somebody else? Ultimately, it has to be the person or persons with the right skills and that is likely to be the person with the best track record of converting prospects to sales.

2. Define your ideal customer profile

When you’re looking for prospects, it’s a good idea to know exactly what you’re looking for. This may sound obvious, but again a huge number of companies don’t do it or don’t revisit it often enough.

The best way to go about building a customer profile is to list all the factors you use or can think of to classify your existing customer base.

Then identify the top seven to ten and prioritise them. A typical list might include the following:

3. Build your Database

There’s no doubt that your own database will always out-perform bought in lists, but how do you build your database and how many records does it have to have to deliver the level of sales you need?

At first glance, that’s a chicken and egg question, but on reflection there is an easy way to get the answer. Start by agreeing the number of sales you need per month to generate a level of revenue that will allow the business to grow and prosper.

Say you find you need 10 sales a month, the next step is to look at the success ratio of proposals you make. If your strike rate is one in five, then you need to make 50 proposals a month to get your 10 sales.

what is prospecting - sales funnel

Now, you have to look at the number of prospects you need to reach each month to make 50 proposals. Say that ratio is 10:1; this means you will need 500 prospects to get sales results you need.

Armed with this information and your average response rate to your database you can estimate how big your database must be to deliver the sales you need. If your database is good you might get a 12% response rate, this would mean your database of prospects has to have a minimum of 4167 records to deliver those 10 sales a month.

The likelihood is you will need to buy or acquire data to keep topping up your prospects database to the level required. Buying data is a subject all on its own and I won’t attempt to cover that here, but if you’d like any advice please feel free to give me a call.

4. Create a communications strategy to reach your target prospects

New business communications strategies work best when they warm up the prospects so that when you make contact it is not a ‘cold call’. The messages need to build faith in your business so the prospects trust you and what you have to offer.

Maximise the use of referrals, case studies and other testimonials. Send messages via the communication channels your prospects use in their daily work life; there are a host of options including: