Perpetual Hunger

Sales Prospecting Lessons & Strategy

Patrick Tinney

• Publisher: Centroid Publishing
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780993828447
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

Sales Prospecting is sustenance for any business, where growthis required and account turnover is nothing more than a fact of life. Sales Prospecting is the precursor to consultative sellingand sales negotiation. These three sales disciplines are permanently bolted together and reliant on each other. No company owns a piece of business in our 24/7, global world of unrelenting competition.

By reading this book, you are seeking constructive methods to dig new money out of the ground and guide this new found cash to profitable closure. In “ Perpetual Hunger: Sales Prospecting Lessons & Strategy”, you will find a series of real-life lessons, business vignettes, tactics, and strategies to help you make consistently prospect at a superior level. I like to call this “chasing smart money”.

I have specifically written Perpetual Hunger to address the prospecting needs and account churn needs of sales professionals, entrepreneurs and start-ups. Our mission is to provide you with strong examples of how to engage professional buyers who are well-schooled in procurementprocesses. Processes that are systematic and culturally designed to unbundle seller costs. Perpetual Hunger will enable sales professionals and entrepreneurs to bring their best sales game to any buyer’s boardroom table.

PART 1

PHILOSOPHY

1

TODAY’S SALES PROSPECTING BIG GAME HUNT

We are eight years into the Great Recession and sales prospecting has never been more important.

Today, we stand with unprecedented consumer debt in North America. The USA is still bouncing in and out of recession-like economic conditions. The US Federal Reserve Bankers are so data dependent regarding the sluggish world economy that they choose not to raise interest rates. It is estimated that there is as much as $1.8 trillion dollars of unspent capital expenditure budgets lying dormant on North American corporate balance sheets. Corporations want to make money but do not want to spend money. Many businesses have resorted to shrinking the size of their operations to fit their declining revenues. Topline sales growth is a guessing game for many companies. Account churn is a challenge.

There are signs of economic improvement, but it’s masked by the trillions of dollars of government Central Bank liquidity and quantitative easing being injected into financial systems around the world. Japan has even resorted to negative interest rates to encourage business growth.

Sales prospecting is extremely competitive with too many sellers chasing too few buyers. This indicates we are in the clutches of a buyers’ market, and the buyers know they have the upper hand. Question? What is your company doing to grow its topline sales and protect precious margins in this hunting expedition?

Business leaders have created a time compressed business world. Improved technology (both good and bad) and a 24/7 environment, means greater demands are placed on all business people. It doesn’t matter whether you are selling or buying. Vendors need to sell more, while buyers need to take more time to research, consider and decide on their best options. As such, time compression reveals a fairly noticeable drop in civility. With so little time and so many changes in our current marketplace, we need to raise our game or have a competitor eat our sales breakfast.

Quickly add in the unique nature of your own company’s competitive and economic realities, and now you really get the picture. In spite of all this, I am very constructive on sales prospecting and, I see opportunity everywhere.

As you read Perpetual Hunger, I want you to have a highlighter and a pen on hand. Write all over this book. Make notes and as I mentioned earlier, complete the exercises with the mindset that the personal learning and exploration of the exercises will significantly improve your sales prospecting skills. These are skills that will help you become a razor sharp business person. How will these exercises make me sharper you ask? It’s simple. Skill sets you will be learning will be transferable to other segments of your business world.

Lastly, please approach Part I of Perpetual Hunger with an open mind. Part I is about philosophies around sales prospecting. Adopt the lessons and thought processes that resonate with you most. Pull these mind sets into your daily sales prospecting routines and grow your business. Having a philosophical base to fall back on will make sales prospecting more fun and doable. When the world of sales prospecting has order, backed by a solid philosophy, the only limits you face are the limits you yourself create. Let’s start building our base. Let’s get going!

2

YOU NEED A HUNGRY SALES PROSPECTING PHILOSOPHY

Sales prospecting is rough and tough. Anyone who has had to dig sales out of parched, hard earth knows it can be challenging to most and just too much for many. In my early days of selling community newspaper advertising in Edmonton, Alberta, I didn’t own a car. My territory was many miles away from our office. Every morning, my roommate who also worked for the newspaper, would drive me out to the bottom end of my territory. I would be dressed in a three piece woolen, grey pin-stripe suit. It was a blistering hot summer and I would walk all day making cold calls on small businesses trying to sell advertisements into our newspaper. I would walk for miles to our designated pick up point for my ride back to the office, just in time to process my newly sold advertisements. This was my daily routine. Eventually, I wore out my only pair of dress shoes and had to write home to my mother to ask her for money for new shoes. All of my commissions were going to pay rent and to cover the numerous plates of French fries, gravy, beans and the occasional hamburger…the mainstay of my diet. Tough times. Regardless, these lessons made me humble and gritty. Later in my career, these tough times bolstered me when I had to dig deep, to close multi-million dollar deals.

I was totally focused on making dozens and dozens of physical cold calls or go hungry. Through these challenging times you develop a philosophy that drives you forward. Sales prospecting definitely requires a philosophy or a stacked base of hierarchical thinking to be your compass. Here is my five point philosophy for sales prospecting that will make you stronger and more importantly, make you money.

Customer churn is natural - In almost any market, there are customers who are entering and exiting. There are also customers who are restless and reallocating supplier expenditures in the market. This is natural and, to a degree healthy in that it keeps all sales professionals and entrepreneurs on their toes, searching for opportunities that are just around the corner. In my early days in business, we used to say if you see a truck stacked full of drywall…chase it, because it just might be heading to a new building with new customers.

Expect innovation and competition - The marketplace never rests on its past achievements, nor should you. The sheer mass and velocity of change in the market today is breathtaking. This always gives us something to talk about with new customers. We have a new story to share, to help their business become smarter, faster and more profitable with each new day. Our sales competitors feel exactly the same way, except, they never sleep. These competitors are always eyeing and maneuvering around our most prized accounts, hoping to show these customers their great new game changing ideas.

Build in a “No” factor - Not everyone is as enlightened as we are about our business point of difference. Not everyone has budget to participate in our great offers. Not everyone is going to like us. Too bad. The opportunity is that the above conditions change on an hourly and daily basis depending on our potential customer’s needs. As a nine year old boy with a need for money after my dad suddenly passed away, I became obsessed with making money. My family was broke. Living in Canada, I decided to open up my own snow shoveling business and prayed for snow every day. If over an inch of snow fell, I was out after school and on weekends knocking on hundreds and hundreds of doors selling my snow shoveling services. Was I nervous about knocking on the door of a householder I didn’t know? Not a chance. To me these homeowners were gold and I needed to work, so I could keep up with school activities that required money all the while taking financial pressure off my Mom. I was on a mission!

Hard work promotes prosperity - James Dyson, inventor of Dyson vacuum cleaners has built a multi-billion dollar business. Dyson built thousands of vacuum prototypes before finally meeting the expectations and needs of a hungry market. He did this with his own money in his own workshop. It took more than five years to get his Dyson model right but he had a vision and he wasn’t going to give up without exhausting all technical avenues before achieving breakthrough success. Not all of us have years to stick with one dream. Today our Dyson vacuum cleaner friend owns his Dyson Ltd. multi-billion dollar business. Think about what you could own if you just worked a little harder and were a little more tenacious and innovative.

Get going! Stay hungry! - Get up and go. Being in a state of constant hunger is a goal driven mindset. As a precocious, young college student in Hamilton, Canada, I had a falling out with a lead instructor in my College Advertising Program. I was asked to leave and, I did. Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario was the only other College that offered the same type of Advertising Program. Oakville was some 20 miles away from my home. There was another catch. The College program ran right through our frigid Canadian winters and I didn’t own a car. Solution. Get up at 6 am every day. Eat as much breakfast as fast as I could and take two buses across Hamilton to the Queen Elizabeth Highway connecting Hamilton to Oakville and then hitchhike the remainder of the way to campus. I would stick out my thumb on the highway ramp and look every driver coming toward me straight in the eye. I hitchhiked to College every day and never missed a day of classes. I was never late. I graduated winning the prestigious T. Eaton Advertising award. Get going. Stay Hungry!

There is an old saying, “If you give a person a fish, they will eat. If you teach a person to fish, they will eat for life.” Stay hungry and learn how to hunt and fish!

3

FIVE KEY QUESTIONS IN SALES PROSPECTING

“Know thyself”…is an ancient Greek aphorism. This pithy saying is the basis for giving high achievers in sales prospecting a big advantage over their peers.

For context “we” is our company and our products. The party known as “they” is the customer “we” want to engage.

Dissect these five key sales prospecting questions.

1.Who are we?

2.Who are they?

3.Who do they think we are?

4.How do we find them?

5.How do we convince them…to need us?

The notion that “we” as a corporation send salespeople out into the business world without a deep understanding of what it is we are looking for can easily be described as lost productivity and wasted energy. Equally important is to understand what “we” (our brand) stands for in our market vertical.

1.Who are we?

When a salesperson engages a potential new customer, the customer wants to know what our company name represents, what promises it makes and what promises it has kept with the products it sells. Customers also want to know how long, how consistently and how successfully our company has kept its brand promises.

A deep understanding of “we” information allows salespeople that represent our company to capably and persuasively describe who ‘we” are. If you cannot describe who “we” are, how are you going to know if you are doing the best job selling your company’s products?

One of the easiest ways for a customer to know if a salesperson understands their company and its products is to ask them to describe what they do in a sentence or two. If this short “elevator speech” is not compelling, it is unlikely the salesperson’s proposal will be either.

2.Who are they?

“They” are all that really matters. They are the customers for the products we sell. When we sell to a customer successfully over and o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Philosophy
• Part 2 Exploration & Planning
• Part 3 Relationships & Trust
• Part 4 Preparing to Close
• Part 5 The Aftermath
• Part 6 Simple Negotiation Strategies
• Final Thoughts
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Index