A big shift in the marketplace today is affecting the way you prospect with new potential customers and how you follow-up with existing ones. They don’t have time for small talk and aren’t interested in impromptu check-in calls that lack clear purpose.
Instead, they insist on value in every conversation. No exceptions.
Your job isn’t to pitch your newest product or service. Rather, it’s about being able to demonstrate the worth of that product or service in terms that show your customer or prospect how their business will be improved. To create and maintain a high-growth, high-profit business you must be more deliberate in your prospecting approach and how you frame your message.
This means you must get serious about having a methodical process.
A CASE STUDY ON PROCESS-FOCUSED PROSPECTING
To understand better how to do that, let’s look at highlights of a recent LinkedIn Live talk I had with a long-time client of mine, Bryan Wright of Orbitform. He’s the VP of Sales at a manufacturing company that made major changes to how they approached prospecting in the wake of an earlier turbulent time: back in 2008-2009, when their number-one market (the automotive industry) suddenly wasn’t buying the way they used to.
As Bryan puts it: “We said this will never happen again.” Working with Engage Selling, here’s what they did next to—as he puts it—“Orbitformize” their prospecting.
Invest in being direct—Bryan and his team recognized that in their line of work, there’s no substitute for a firm handshake and a face-to-face meeting. So as they reduced their number of sales reps from 20 to 7, they boosted the amount of travel time those reps would do: visiting prospects and customers in the field, one week out of every three. This was the first in a series of steps that helped the company take more control over their prospecting efforts and grow in bold new directions.
Create a metric for engagement—Since face-to-face meetings became the pivotal part of their new strategy, they needed an internal unit of measure to describe each successful one undertaken. They called theirs Customer Facetime Engagements or CFEs. It took off like a rocket. As Bryan explains: “Initially we went from doing 300 CFEs a year. Last year we did 2,800.”
Turn everything into a fact-finding mission—Orbitform sales reps weren’t visiting prospects and clients with the goal of delivering sales pitches. That fact was reinforced by their new CFE metric, which was defined as each successful effort to move the needle in the direction of gaining a deeper understanding of a prospect’s business. Every on-site visit became a fact-finding mission to meet more people involved in the prospect/customer’s buying decision-making process, and to look first-hand at the unique challenges they were dealing with in their work.
Play the long game with research—Acquired knowledge is never wasted. Even when lockdowns in 2020 put face-to-face visits on hiatus, Orbitform sales reps doubled down on researching their prospects and customers “We focused on understanding our customers’ problems—sometimes learning things that even they didn’t know—so that when we were able to meet again, we more than ready to do business.”
Be skillful with validation—“One of the golden nuggets we learned from working with Engage Selling,” Bryan explains, “was about the importance of being as accurate as possible in your pipeline.” As I regularly remind my clients: validation isn’t a gut feeling. Facts are the only reliable input to give you legitimate confidence in deciding whether a particular prospect has a good chance of becoming a new customer.
Know your prospecting inputs…cold—I cover this in great detail in my earlier book, Non-Stop Sales Boom: once you define all your inputs, you’ll know how much prospecting effort has to go into achieving your targets. Again, no more gut feelings: just facts to get real results.
Always be learning—This last point is where Orbitform performs like no other company I’ve ever seen. They are masters at teaching sales mastery. All prospecting efforts are re-evaluated at their weekly sales meetings, and during periodic one-on-one coaching sessions. As Bryan explains, sales meetings involve looking at the scorecards for the week. This reinforces the sense of immediacy to produce results day-to-day. Next, they role-play the prospecting they’ve undertaken and evaluate its effectiveness. Everything is a learning opportunity to renew and sharpen your selling skills.
PUT PROCESS-FOCUSED PROSPECTING TO WORK FOR YOU
As you can see, it’s time to reevaluate the way you and your company thinks about prospecting…because the marketplace sure has already! The more you engage people with value first, the more you show you’re not wasting their time, and that you understand fully the unique challenges they deal with in their business. The sooner you do this—adopting a deliberate, repeatable series of steps to produce predictable results—the faster you’ll be on the trajectory to new growth and new success.