Prospecting & Qualifying

Brian Sullivan Interviews Jonathan Farrington to bring you more information on The Hunt for New Clients.

Mike Montague interviews Mike Crandall about how to succeed at prospecting during the pandemic.

During times of adversity or crisis, it's easy to get discouraged and stop prospecting. As I write this, we're currently in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. As you might imagine, it has had a huge impact on the business world!

This crisis has caused a lot of head trash for a lot of people! Maybe you've said one of the following things...

This year, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the book, Dave will revisit each of the original 49 Sandler Rules and give updated takes on their relevance to salespeople and sales leaders.

Everyone loves referrals. They're the most efficient way of prospecting and building up your sales and your business. But are you actively and strategically working on building your referral network?

Or maybe you just have something like this in your email signature or on your business card: "The best compliment you can give us is a referral."

That's not active or strategic!

In sales, we tend not to dig deep enough. When a prospect shares a problem with us, often we jump ahead to a solution we provide that seems to fit the problem. But in reality, they're sharing symptoms, not the real problem! Instead, we need to dig deeper to uncover the true pain.

The Sandler pain funnel is a tool to dig deeper, uncover information, and discover emotion.

Prospecting is the life-blood of sales. But usually salespeople prospect when they have nothing else to do. Sometimes that's because they've been doing the same prospecting activities for years!

Your time is valuable. So why are you wasting it when you're prospecting? Quit doing the wrong type of prospecting!

One of the concepts we help our clients understand is active prospecting versus passive prospecting. Based off the names alone, you probably already realize that passive prospecting takes less work but is also less effective. Conversely, active prospecting takes more work but is more effective.

If a prospect is going to say "no," would you rather know right now, or months from now after you've poured tons of time, energy, and resources into following up with them? Right now, of course! That's one of the first concepts we help our clients learn. It saves tons of wasted time. And if you waste time on the wrong people, you're robbing the right people of that time. However, you can take that concept too far. If you're not careful, you can make assumptions and judgements that aren't correct, and end up disqualifying a prospect too early in the process. You end up deciding that they aren't a good fit instead of letting them discover that for themselves!

Just about everyone hates cold calling. David Sandler himself was quoted as saying, "Nobody ever had to wait in line to make a cold call." Then why are people still making cold calls?