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The Need to See Prospects

Posted by: Tom Suddes November 16, 2007

I love the magazine Selling Power (mostly just because I love the idea of sales). Gerhard Gschwandtner is the founder and publisher of Selling Power and has had a tremendous influence on my thinking. The subtitle of the magazine is “Solutions for Sales Management”, and they provide a lot of solutions!

I was skimming an old issue (May 2005) looking for more stuff on PROSPECTS and I came across this article called

GET OVER IT!
Post-9/11 Everything Changed EXCEPT THE NEED TO SEE PROSPECTS!

(Those are my caps and my exclamation point.)

The article was by Geoffrey James.

Here are the guts of the article:

1. “It’s never been more difficult to get through to an executive to make a FORMAL APPOINTMENT.” In our For Impact World, we deal with that in a number of ways. Most importantly, we don’t look for a “FORMAL APPOINTMENT”…
   but rather a VISIT!!!’APPOINTMENT’ (especially a ‘FORMAL’ one) immediately triggers your synapses to think ‘DOCTOR’! Or, worse, ‘DENTIST’!
2. “You have to do a better job of making prospects want to see you.” The way we do that is making a big, big deal of PREDISPOSITION!!!
3. The absolute best PREDISPOSITION for all of us in the For Impact World is to actually bring the ‘prospect’ to where you deliver your service. Let them SEE, TOUCH, HEAR, SMELL WHAT you do. Make it palpable. Make it memorable. Make it an experience.
4. “Once you do get in, however, you’d better be prepared to build a LASTING RELATIONSHIP.” WOW! As most of you know, our GOAL with all of our PROSPECTS is to create a RELATIONSHIP… ideally a LIFETIME RELATIONSHIP… and, thenMAXIMIZE THAT RELATIONSHIP…
   AT EVERY GIVEN MOMENT!
   

The article goes on to talk about working to get a ‘VISIT’.

I love their “warning”:

“Working this system requires PREPARATION and PERSISTENCE.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

BOTTOM LINE: Your goal should be to get a VISIT (with a QUALIFIED PROSPECT… to MAXIMIZE THE RELATIONSHIP… at THIS GIVEN MOMENT.) Doing so requires PREPARATION AND PERSISTENCE.

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