Hot Prospects: The Proven Prospecting System to Ramp Up Your Sale - Softcover

Good, Bill

 
9781451648263: Hot Prospects: The Proven Prospecting System to Ramp Up Your Sale
Softcover
ISBN 10: 145164826X ISBN 13: 9781451648263
Verlag: Scribner, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Whatever good or service you're selling, five likely customers are worth a hundred random names. No one can help you find new business by finding those five -- or five hundred, or fifty thousand -- best-qualified customers better than Bill Good.

For over a decade, Bill Good's guide to increasing new business by finding the right prospective customers has been an invaluable resource to people in every imaginable profession involving selling. Now completely revised and updated to include lessons on how email, fax machines, and the Internet can be incorporated into an effective prospecting and selling campaign, it is the most valuable tool a salesperson can own.

Anyone who does any prospecting or selling by phone -- from securities, insurance, and real estate to fund-raising -- knows the frustrations and rejections inherent in "cold calling." Many people come to fear it. But why should this be so? Certainly there are people out there who need and want the product you're selling. If only you could more efficiently generate a list of just those people, weed out the hopeless cases, and launch a simple and highly effective campaign to win them to your side. Prospecting Your Way to Sales Success shows you how to do just that. Bill Good draws on all he's learned from a long, successful career teaching companies and individual entrepreneurs how to create successful prospecting campaigns. He jettisons the stale, old-school, don't-believe-a-customer-who-says-no philosophy for a plan of attack that finds good prospects while quickly screening out unqualified, uninterested customers. From the first contact to the final close, Bill Good will help you design a complete, customized prospecting campaign.

In this new revised edition, bursting with fresh ideas for incorporating new media and new technologies into his proven campaign strategies, Bill Good has updated a classic and given salespeople everywhere a book they can't afford to live without.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bill Good is the president of Bill Good Marketing, Inc., a sixty-five-person firm based in South Jordan, Utah, that specializes in helping salespeople worldwide increase their sales or work less. He is also the creator of the Bill Good Marketing System, a computer-based client marketing, prospecting, and office management system designed to coordinate today's modern sales team. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and did graduate work in economics at the University of Virginia.

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Chapter 1

Prospecting

The Old School vs. the New School

"Don't throw good money after bad."

Bill Good, age nine

My family frequently went to dinner at the S&W Cafeteria in Greensboro, North Carolina. They had some kind of wishing well in the lobby. My brother Ed was throwing handfuls of coins in it. I said, "Ed, quit it! Don't throw good money after bad." As near as I can figure, some fellow who worked for an ad agency overheard my comment. He ran some kind of local ad with a picture of a kid throwing money in a wishing well and used my statement as a slogan. Whatever he was selling never caught on. But within a matter of months, my statement became known worldwide.

Many of the famous statements you have grown up with were actually said first by me. From ages nine to eleven, I was, frankly, precocious. Many of my comments on life were picked up by others and even made into advertising or political slogans. I never received credit or money. By age eleven, I realized that others were profiting from my comments, and so I shut up for a long time. With the publication of this book, however, I decided to accept the recognition due the authorship of these statements. You will find many of them in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Look in the author section under "Anon."

You came into sales to sell, but it's not working out that way. Perhaps you wanted to be a financial adviser and help people make their fortune (as well as your own, of course). You didn't think most of your time would be spent making phone calls in an endless search for people with money. And worse, you had no idea that people wouldn't welcome your call. After all, you have ideas that should help people get a better return on their money than they now enjoy.

Or perhaps you're in real estate. You wanted to help people find new homes, not spend hours sitting at an open house that no one attends, or walking door-to-door to meet the neighbors. And just last week, a dog scared you half to death as it lunged at you from under a shrub.

Or you sell life insurance. You know that if you can help one or two families each week protect their assets and provide for their families, you can make a very good living in the process.

You found out in a hurry, of course, that most people really don't want to talk to a life insurance agent. But not even in your most pessimistic brooding about your future did you realize it could be as bad as it really is.

The problem is really driven home to you at your wife's company Christmas party. She had warned you not to talk business, but in the back of your mind, you had an idea that people would at least want to know about some of the new life insurance products on the market.

Drink in hand, you bided your time, then, as expected, someone asked what you do for a living.

"I'm a life insurance agent," you said.

You might as well have said, "I'm a mentally disordered sex offender currently under psychiatric care." The room couldn't have emptied out any faster.

Now, you certainly didn't come into sales to frighten or offend people.

The Problem with Sales Is Prospecting!

Where did all the prospects go? Are there just too many salespeople, or did something happen to scare them off?

Worse, the longer you've been in sales, the more you hate prospecting. Why? They turn you down, reject you. And because they reject you and because prospects are so hard to come by, you try harder and harder. And the harder you try, the more scared they get.

It's interesting that the major problem in sales is not really a problem with sales. It's a prospecting problem. And that problem is scarcity. Most salespeople act as if there are too few good prospects.

The reason you are reading this book is that you don't have enough prospects. If you had all you could handle, you certainly wouldn't be looking at a book on prospecting. Yes, I am very well aware that 99 percent of the salespeople in this country believe that rejection is THE PROBLEM. But that's not it. If you really believed that there were enough prospects for you, would you care if some jerk hung up on you? But since you and most other salespeople believe -- consciously or subconsciously -- that prospects are scarce, then rejection threatens survival. And that hurts.

So rejection is not the problem in sales. Nor is it closing, a lack of product or service knowledge, too high a price, the "competition," or poor company advertising. The problem is scarcity of prospects. But we live in a country of 266 million people. How can prospects be scarce?

Julius Caesar said, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

I say, "The reason for a scarcity of prospects lies not in the market but in our method." And that method is one I call the Old School.

The Old School Style of Selling

Every sales trainer I ever had, plus all that I've read, has focused on overcoming objections and on closing. J. Douglas Edwards, perhaps the best of what I call the Old School trainers, preached that "half of your sales will be made after the prospect has said no six times." Mona Ling, a prominent trainer in the insurance industry, promotes "tested answers" to life insurance objections. A flyer promoting a set of cassette tapes came across my desk recently featuring a photo of the trainer and the back end of his car. His vanity license plate said, "CLOSER."

This concentration on closing and overcoming objections has defined a lifestyle for countless millions of salespeople. In order to understand fully the fact that this is not another book in that tradition, I do think we should spend a few minutes highlighting the Old School. Then you will understand what my system isn't.

Old School Teachings

If you have been around sales more than one day, I am certain you have heard one or more versions of the three principles summarized below. I personally have no idea where I first heard them and doubt if anyone should be given credit, or blame, as the case may be. At any rate, here are the philosophical foundations of the Old School.

* All buyers are liars.

* Don't believe the prospect until he or she has said no three, six, twelve, or twenty-seven times.

* Every no gets you that much closer to a yes.

As you can well imagine, if you believe these principles, they will affect the way you live your life. If you sell insurance, when the prospect says no, you will press ahead anyway thinking you are that much closer to a yes. If you are a financial adviser or planner and the prospect tells you he or she doesn't have any money now, you won't believe him or her but will charge forward anyway, mining the prospect's evening and your own when the prospect tells you which anatomical portion should receive your solicitation.

Most Old School salespeople, consciously or otherwise, believe and act as if there is a war between buyer and seller, and that your job as seller is to win! "We Shall Overcome" was not just the theme song of the civil rights movement. It's a song the "sales movement" has been singing for generations. It's one reason your call usually isn't welcome. Too many generations of prospects have been overcome.

Applying Old School Principles

If you work in insurance, real estate, most financial services (except, of course, where my company does the training!), appliances, automobiles, or just about anything else, you have most likely been trained in the Old School -- if you have had any training at all. If you have had no formal training, you've still gotten the Old School message. Like a powerful undertow, whenever you put a toe in the sales water, it's tugging on you.

Let's...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2011
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
145164826X
ISBN 13 
9781451648263
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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