Critical Skills For Sales Leaders - Sales Prospecting and Business Development

Sales prospecting or business development is a key activity for most sales driven organisations and for most salespeople. It is also the cause of demise of most sales careers. Business development is a skill and must be mastered if you are to sustain a long-term sales career.

The current volatile economic environment, sagging consumer confidence, increasing customer distrust, more informed customers and tougher competition have put excessive pressure on sales teams in all companies making it harder and harder to get out there and develop new business.
As a professional salesperson you:

• are facing growing pressure as others compete for your accounts,
• find yourself having to discount to bring home deals,
• struggle with sales cycles that just seem to get longer and longer

If that's not bad enough, you still have to struggle to maintain a full pipeline. Do you ever wonder how others seem to manage?

The fear of rejection Do you dread the "prospecting" part of sales? Do you find the constant rejection excruciating?

Whilst effective prospecting is a critical component of sustainable sales success, it is not selling. As a salesperson, you may be a well trained in selling skills and product knowledge; you may not have learned specifically about prospecting. Business development is mostly learned through trial and error and unfortunately for many, ends up as a career disaster.

Effective training and coaching, tailored to suit each individual salesperson and their own specific issue around prospecting/business development, will have a huge impact on your sales revenue. It shouldn't ever take a suit of armour and great gulps of courage to deal with the issues of fear of rejection during prospecting. It takes understanding and a plan.

Effective business development/prospecting requires a plan Winning salespeople recognise that to be effective at prospecting, it should never be done by the "seat of one's pants". Effective sales prospecting/business development requires a well thought out plan. This means sitting with your manager or Sales Performance Coach and objectively assessing your current situation, setting realistic and achievable goals and creating both strategies and tactics to achieve that goal.

If you've been taught that Sales Prospecting is just a "numbers game", and to believe that a prospect is someone who can be convinced that they need your product, you've been playing the wrong game. One of the major causes of failure in sales is the fear of rejection. If your sales strategy is to see lots of people and play the numbers game, regardless of how qualified they are, you are simply setting yourself lots of rejection. If you believe that you need to get in front of as many prospects as possible, you're confusing a "true prospect" with people who may be "interested" but unlikely to do business with you. When you play the prospecting game by attempting to "sell" an appointment with as many people as possible, you're setting yourself up for failure and probable burnout.

"Don't Go Fishing in the Sahara!" Traditionally salespeople are taught to "sell" to everyone they contact. They are taught that selling is a "numbers game." As a result of this out dated and out-moded way of selling, salespeople:

• Waste much of their time.
• Avoid sales prospecting and business development because of rejection
• Lose interest and become demotivated
• Face prospects who don't want to and have no interest in hearing about what they have to sell

Effective business development means shifting the paradigm from attempting to "sell" to everyone you contact, to contacting those potential customers who actually want what you're selling! Winning salespeople effectively target those prospects with whom they to want to work. They identify, plan, and execute a well thought through prospecting effort.