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A simple change you can make to maximise your salespeople’s time and gain more business

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

Bill Gates.

What are your sales people doing on an average day? 

Consider the following:

Salespeople typically spend just 20% of their time actually selling.  The remaining 80% is spent prospecting, managing existing clients and administration.  In other words, you’ve got a highly skilled, highly compensated employee spending just 2 hours out of every 10 doing what they do best. To secure just one new client, the average salesperson usually needs to pursue 100 prospects. Typically, each of these prospects needs to be contacted 7 times before a sale is made. And as key decision makers are frequently difficult to identify, a salesperson must spend time and effort qualifying each new target.

Generating qualified B2B leads is a numbers game. If a salesperson must talk to 100 prospects to generate one new client, then it would follow that to generate 10 new clients they have to contact 1,000 prospects.   Assuming it generally takes 2 -5 calls to reach each prospect, that means they’ll be making between 2 and 5 thousand calls to secure 10 new clients.   That’s a lot of calls.  In fact, it’s a full time job.

But is this really the best use of your sales people’s time?

The fact is, only a dedicated prospecting resource focused exclusively on lead generation can manage those kinds of numbers. And these are rarely the highly charged sales animals that thrive in the cut-throat world of sales. In general, they’re less outgoing. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t good communicators. In fact, very often they perform better on the telephone than their field sales counterparts, who by their nature rely heavily on their outgoing personalities and assertive body language to make a sale (both of which are denied to them on the telephone).   

An effective prospecting resource needs to spend its time on 3 primary activities:  identifying and cleansing prospects, making an initial introduction, and nurturing qualified leads.   Any time a prospect shows interest throughout this process, they should be passed to the sales team to follow up. 

Meanwhile, your sales team should focus their time and effort on closing new business and working with existing customers. The worst thing you can do is to force members of your sales team to make prospecting calls if they don’t enjoy it. Not only is it a misguided use of resources, prospecting also takes a certain kind of person. Some love it, some hate it.  If they don’t enjoy it, you can be certain it will come out in every word they say and their results will be abysmal – even if they’re the best sales person around. I’ve seen it happen!

Having a dedicated prospecting resource, whether internal our outsourced, can have a dramatic impact on filling your sales funnel with B2B leads and the amount of business your sales team closes.

This division-of-duties will:

• Increase the amount of leads in your sales funnel
• Free your sales team to concentrate on your core business
• Increase competitiveness by reducing costs and enhancing service levels
• Ensure that prospects continue to receive communications until they are ready to enter the buying cycle

 Assuming your sales closing rate remains constant, it is possible to calculate how many new opportunities your prospecting resource must generate to pay for itself.  If the numbers stack up, you have the makings of a powerful new-business acquisition team.

And finally, a rare, and no doubt unwitting, glimpse of honesty from someone who may well be reflecting on their words this Christmas:

“The nature of any human being, certainly anyone on Wall Street, is ‘the better deal you give the customer, the worse deal it is for you’”.

Bernard Madoff

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading. As ever, your comments and ideas are very welcome. 

And always to a higher response!

 Norman

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