Prospecting is fundamental and key to growing your sales. In this video, Tim Deuitch and Susan Hall share three tips for improving prospecting so that you can better profile, develop a value proposition, and write an access message that speaks to your prospect.
Tim Deuitch: 00:01 Susan, I do a lot of prospecting, you do a lot of prospecting, and certainly our customers do a tremendous amount of prospecting. If we were to offer three bits of advice to our customers, if somebody asks you, "Susan, what are the three things we can do to demystifying and clarify our path for prospecting?" What would you say is the first?
Susan Hall: 00:32 The first thing, and I don't think a lot of organizations do it, but is to take the time and identify what are the criteria for a good prospect. Go through that activity as a team, as an organization, and come up with a handful or so of criteria, as well as the deal breakers. So that, when the sales people look at a particular organization, they can see if it's going to be a match. It's got to be good for us, good for them.
Tim Deuitch: 00:57 Correct, and I love the deal breaker dynamic. Challenge yourself to say, "Even if I got the business, even if I got into this, is it going to really pay off for us?" I love that deal breaker. One that I'd add, has to do with your value proposition. Now that you've done the criteria and you have your list, and there they are looking at you, and you've done some more research. You've got to discern, would they be interested, truly interested in us? Have we seen anything in the research that indicates that what we have as a brand and as an experience that we would bring them, and certainly our solutions, is that something that would be a fit for them? In other words, can we say to them in our mediums, our phone call, our emails, our blogs, can we say to them, "We're the type of organization that can help you, we should talk."
Susan Hall: 01:49 Right, and that goes into the third tip, which is creating a really compelling access message. Once you've identified who is it within the organization that you want to call on, you can use that information to build some commonality. "We're an organization that's helped other organizations in your industry do this by such and such." Whatever that is, get really clear on why that individual should talk to you and why you should talk to them, and create that simplistic, powerful access message.
Tim Deuitch: 02:21 Somewhere in those sentences, those initial sentences of the access message, they need to see commonality. They need to hear and then feel that, "Oh, okay, you get us a little bit." We have something definitely in common.
Susan Hall: 02:35 And you've got experience in the area where I need help in.
Tim Deuitch: 02:38 Right. Perfect. So, three things. Profile them as tightly as possible. Attach your value proposition to them, genuinely, not hopefully, genuinely, and write an access message that speaks to that.
Susan Hall: 02:53 Absolutely.
