Article 101

Are you prospecting or torturing yourself?
Five practices that always lead to frustration and failure.

1. Working from a paper system.

If you are trying to make notes, update contact info and track next actions on paper, you have decreased your productivity by 50% - 65% easily. No exaggeration. Spreadsheet programs don't come close to doing the job either. You are not really prospecting unless you are using a tool like Goldmine, Act or Maximizer. For less than $200 you can work at maximum efficiency and rip most of the drudgery out of sales prospecting.

2. Not selecting the best targets to call.

Would you wade through sludge to find a few nuggets of gold, when you could be jack hammering through a solid vein of gold? Many appointment setters make that choice and wonder why they get frustrated by lack of results. Realistically, you would implement your prospecting program with 50-75 new suspects a week. 200-300 a month. Many choose to wade through sludge because they "don't want to miss anyone." This is dumb. Your choice should always be to call the highest quality pool of suspects you can. My book "Setting Sales Appointments" goes into selecting the best pool of suspects to call in depth.

3. Not preparing scripts so as to sound natural.

When you do not prepare scripts you do sound natural - like a natural sounding time waster. Many people I work with labor hard to come up with 1 or 2 variations of a set the appointment script with responses to common resistance that are tight, powerful and work. Yet many resist preparing what they will say under the guise of sounding non-scripted. You sound scripted not because you have prepared the best words to use to accomplish your objective... you sound scripted because you deliver them poorly. Prepare. Practice delivery. Open more doors. You simply cannot come up with effective words off the cuff with every conversation. You lose opportunities when you are not prepared.

4. Not having a Plan B for the unreachables and no's

You work hard to get a decision-maker on the phone. Converting one in five conversations to an appointment for a big-ticket item is pretty good. Those who do not agree to meet will typically buy again from someone or review vendors within 3 - 18 months. Do you have a strategy to get them into your sales funnel and start
building a relationship so that you will be invited to the table the next time vendors are reviewed? If you don't, much of your prospecting effort is being wasted. There is far more profit potential among the group that doesn't immediately agree to meet.

Are you doing something to capture these opportunities? The book outlines in detail how to implement a Plan B.

5. Not working with a pre-defined call process.

How much time and effort is enough to realistically schedule an appointment? How much is too much? If you don't invest enough time or make enough attempts you fail. If you make too many you start to beat your head against the wall. The best way to avoid that is to define a call process that you will follow. Vary from it only for very good reasons. Most of the time I use a 3 cycles of 3 call process. Day one call and ID the decision-maker. Next day make 3 dials to see if they will pick up the phone. If they don't I leave a voicemail and send a fax. Three business days later I do the same thing... and again three days after that. If I don't have an appointment or inquiry at that point I have reached the point of diminishing returns and I let go. Only with very very good objective reasons would I invest more time on a suspect. Have you worked out your optimal call and activity pattern?

There are many potholes in seeking to set appointments with high-level decision-makers. It is not as difficult as it is tedious and boring. Use the right system, avoid the potholes and you can minimize the tedium and maximize the results... and it is the results which keep us going.

Best wishes with your sales and marketing,
Scott Channell

copyright 2005 - 2009 scott channell

Article 32	Prospecting or torturing yourself??
	by Scott Channell