Prospecting & Qualifying

Our prospects have been trained, by salespeople seeking to get their needs met at the expense of rather than in service to their clients, not to trust salespeople so they developed mechanisms to reduce the “influence” that salespeople have in the buying process. One of the most common is to put up a (virtual) paper wall by requesting a proposal/quote/information from us before we’ve even gotten to “hello.”

Mike Montague interviews Hamish Knox on How to Succeed at Trials and Demos.

When you’re in the middle of a prospecting discussion – that is, when you’re initiating the first real-time voice-to-voice engagement with a possible buyer – what is your goal?

These days, everyone is using online resources to initiate early prospecting discussions via digital media. Which is part of the problem. How do you avoid looking and sounding like everybody else in the digital realm? Below, you will find three simple strategies that will help you to stand out when you are prospecting online.

Mike Montague interviews Brian Jackson on How to Succeed at Your 30 Second Commercial. Brian is an award-winning Sandler Trainer in San Diego, CA.

A salesperson’s only valuables are their time and information. Many salespeople waste time with suspects instead of real prospects because they have no process to support them in quickly sorting out the time wasters from the true potential clients.

Just as it doesn’t matter what we say, it matters what our prospect hears, how we listen to our prospect while determine whether we succeed in getting paid on the information we gather instead of going into knowing mode and presuming a sale when none may exist.

Our prospects are smart. They are also (for now) human so sometimes they forget to check a box in their selection process or they fall victim to a heuristic. This is a great opportunity for us to break rapport or elevate ourselves closer to “trusted adviser” status by asking a presumptive question.

Mike Montague interviews the Email Marketing Heroes, Rob, and Kennedy, on How to Succeed at Email Marketing. They are the founders of ResponseSuite for survey-based email marketing, hosts of the Email Marketing Show podcast, and course creators who help DIY marketers learn how to concur email marketing.

At some point in a quarter, or at least a year, the proactive prospecting activities that have worked to fill our funnel stop working. No matter the type, prospect or talk tracks the activities that were working last week aren’t this week and might not for weeks to come.