Sales Prospecting – My 2 Cents

There are schools of thought that believe that “less is best” and/or create the idea that when sharing something or trying to teach a concept that the best approach is to be “clear and concise” in your delivery.  I agree that these are extremely valuable ideas and try to practice this in my day to day communication. 

That being said, a critical piece of my job is training a new employee on what my clients are looking for in a qualified sales opportunity and what we need to do to achieve this deliverable, while at the same time, make the opportunity extremely appealing to the client’s sales rep.  A concept  I have deleveloped, perhaps concept is not the right word, but approach that I take and find extremely valuable is to relate the process of uncovering that opportunity to the creation of a painting.

What do I mean?

Well frame it like this – my clients look for us to deliver qualified sales opportunities – what is a qualified sales opportunity?  This includes all the information that we think about that is relevant to any sales process – pain/need, current environment, budget, decision making process, and timeframe.

When I describe to a rep what I would like them to uncover while qualifying a prospect, I use my “painting” analogy:  imagine if I showed you a painting of a beach, a nice white sandy beach, with rolling waves, a bright clear blue sky, and warm sunshine – this is probably pretty appealing !  But I then ask the question – what if I showed you that same painting of the beach with a chair and umbrella, perhaps a cooler next to the chair, a surfboard, and a seagull flying.  How much more appealing is this painting – the answer is “much more.”

How does this tie to opportunity generation – the more details around an opportunity the more appealing it is to a client’s sales rep, the more excited they are to follow-up on it, and most importantly, the more likely that opportunity is going to become a piece of forcastable revenue.

“My 2 Cents”