Research and define your target geographic market.
Depending on the size of area you are able to service you may find some locations more fruitful than others. I once trained bank mangers to cold call to look for prospects. Almost to a man they wanted to travel miles to “industrial areas” often over an hours drive away. Depending on what you are selling often you can find prospects next door. The point I am making is that the search for business needs time spent on research. Say you are selling restaurant equipment you need to find the very new i.e. just being established and the getting older, needing plant renewal type businesses. Just calling “willy-nilly” can be a great time waster. Also be careful not to develop a “milk run” where you are just calling on your old favorites because they are easy to talk to.
As part of your territory analysis you need to put together files on your target market players using such sources as government surveys, census information, trade publications, local newspapers and customer feedback.
Giving speeches or delivering seminars in your geographic area can also uncover potential customers. Local Rotary Clubs for example are always looking for speakers. You can’t go along and do a sales pitch however you could talk about, as an example: “the latest technical and cost saving benefits of modern air conditioners” if you were in the business of selling air conditioners. If you establish yourself as a local expert in your field buyers will often seek you out. In other words as well as knowing the potential customers in your territory you need to have a good grasp of the ‘third party’ lead generation opportunities within your geographical area and how to best utilize them.
Define customer “trigger events” and develop systems to alert yourself when they occur.
(An important facet of finding hot prospects from an article on BNET Australia and from which the basis of this article was built.) “Trigger events are circumstances that make it more likely that a customer will buy from you. For example, if you sell management consulting, a trigger event might be a customer announcement of a management change. Similarly, if you sell supply chain software, a trigger event might be the announcement of a merger.”
To expand on this concept I offer this. A true professional in sales will not just be an expert in his or her product. A true professional salesperson needs to an expert in the user of his/her products business as well. One of the best salesmen I ever met was a finance broker who specialized in arranging finance for earth-moving and construction equipment. He was great at his job because in addition to understanding finance and banking he knew as much about earth-moving and construction as his customers. He particularly new when new projects came up for tender and who the likely winner would be and off he would go to see them.
Recognizing trigger events is one of the most powerful attributes that a successful “hot prospect” focused salesperson can develop.
