Hot Prospects

The Proven Prospecting System to Ramp Up Your Sales Career

Bill Good

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 1997
• Print ISBN: 9781451648263
• eBook ISBN: 9781439123287
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

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.

BOOK TWO

Lead Generation

7

Welcome to the “Do Not Call” Era

If your clients are people you contact at home, you need to read this chapter very carefully.

For you, there are two keys for sales survival in the “Do Not Call” era:

1. You must know the rules and be able to prove that you are abiding by them. It is not enough merely to abide by them. You must be able to prove it. This means that when you check numbers on the DNC website, you keep copies of print screens to prove you are attempting to follow the law.
2. You must have a strategy for prospecting that does not require cold-calling a residential list.

Here are the facts:

1. The national “Do Not Call” laws restrict both interstate and intrastate solicitation calls. This means that any person, anywhere, who has registered with the “Do Not Call” Registry cannot be solicited at the registered numbers without written permission or first responding to some solicitation or becoming a client.
2. As of August 2007, 143 million telephone numbers were registered with the “Do Not Call” registry. There are not a lot of residential or cell phone numbers left. The American public told us, loud and clear, “Don’t call me!” There will always be a few procrastinators, but do you really want them as clients?
3. You can solicit people with business listings. If you are not certain whether a number is a business or a residential number, check the Yellow Pages. If a number is in the Yellow Pages, it should not be registered on the DNC site. You can legally call it.
4. You can call clients who are registered on the DNC site if they have made a transaction with the seller within the past eighteen months unless they have specifically told you “Do not call me.” In this case, you must respect their wishes and not call. It’s the law.
5. You may call people who are registered on the DNC site if they have made an inquiry with the seller within the past ninety days.
   After ninety days you can continue to call prospects at home, as long as they give you written consent. This has no set expiration, but it must (a) be in writing; (b) be signed by the person being called; and (c) include the number you are allowed to call.
   And emails don’t count. Get it in writing.

Based on the pervasive fact that the “Do Not Call” laws exist and are being enforced, we believe you should adopt them as your guide to socially acceptable behavior. When 143 million people scream “Don’t call me!” it doesn’t take a genius to realize you probably shouldn’t call people at home.

If you are in an industry that requires contact-at-home phone numbers, such as home improvement, home construction, investment, and insurance, then you must meticulously gather written consent forms.

The person who gets the written consent will get the client.

On the website for this chapter, we have some sample forms and letters. These have been run past our attorney. You will, nevertheless, need to check with your own counsel before using these documents. The password is consent.

8

Introducing Lead Generation

If you go to Answers.com and search for “another kettle of fish,” you will find this entry: “A very different matter or issue, not necessarily a bad one. For example, ‘They’re paying for the meal? That’s a different kettle of fish.’ First half of 1900s.” That’s almost correct. The true origin is 1958. So the entry from Answers.com should have read, “Second half of 1900s.”

I used to feed my cat, Midnight, in a little kettle. One night she was really hungry. I fed her two kettles of fish. My mother said, “She ate another thing of food?” I replied, “To be precise, that was another kettle of fish.” Our family came to refer to “another kettle of fish” as something different from what was originally said or thought. As it spread outside the family, it just came to mean “something different altogether.”

The sales process consists of three broad phases:

1. Lead generation
2. Lead development
3. Selling

A lead generator will find a person who meets certain minimum qualifications. Sometimes these are red cherries or green cherries. Occasionally a hot prospect will leap up. Most times, the lead developers cull through the people who throw their card in a trade show fishbowl or hit your website. Lead generators are the first line of defense for the salesperson’s time. They find the names of people with some amount of interest and qualification.

Lead development consists of contacting these leads by phone, email, mail, or fax with the intent of upgrading them to the point where they qualify as hot. When so identified, hot prospects are turned over to the sales department to begin the sales process.

FOCUS OF LEAD GENERATION

Lead generation can be broken down into two very broad categories: mass marketing, and relationship marketing.

Mass marketing deals with people you don’t know.

Relationship marketing, which is another kettle of fish, deals with people you do know. We will not deal with relationship marketing in this book.

In some industries—financial services, for one—someone with lots of relationships might never make a cold call, conduct a seminar, or stand in a trade show booth.

THE PLAN

Mass marketing for an individual salesperson or small business is really not “mass marketing.” More properly it should be called “micro marketing,” because the markets we’re dealing with are small.

Our marketplace is certainly not the 13 million small businesses just in the United States, as it is for Microsoft.

It’s a tiny piece of that. But the principles we’re going to apply are some of the principles the big guys also apply. We’ll stick with the term mass marketing.

Here’s the plan:

We are going to step through developing a campaign. You will need the collateral material I’ve put on the web for you. By the end of book 2, “Lead Generation,” you will have created your own campaign and will hopefully try it out.

We are going to master each part. So no fair skipping ahead.

9

Campaigns

The Variables

The phrase “open a can of worms” is thought to be Canadian, from about 1955. It’s actually American, about 1955. We were going fishing, and I had picked up a lot of worms that crawled out on the sidewalk after a rainstorm. I put them in a spaghetti can that normally contained my brother’s favorite food. The poor boy was hungry. He picked up the can and stuck his fork in it. “Ed, no!!” I screamed. “It’s not spaghetti, it’s a can of worms! Don’t open the can of worms! Gross. Yuck.” He dropped it like a hot potato (also mine), spilling my worms. “Open a can of worms” went on to mean to introduce an unsavory subject into a conversation. As nearly as I can recall, there was a Canadian family camped nearby. They undoubtedly overhead me screaming and started telling their relatives when they returned to Canada…which fully explains why so-called experts would assume this is a Canadian statement instead of finding its true source, me.

It’s time to dig in. (Mine.)

I have organized the process of lead generation into campaigns. A campaign is a series of steps or actions, taken in a given market, that produces predictable results. For example: You send out flyers in newspapers promoting free nose piercing for your line of jeweled nose rings. Every time you send out 10,000 flyers, you get 150 to 200 phone calls.

You have a campaign! It involves a series of steps that can be repeated in a given market with predictable results. Whether you are making a profit in the nose ring business is not the issue. A campaign has to produce only predictable results to meet our definition of a campaign. Since your results are predictable, you have a campaign.

But let’s assume that most of the calls are from outraged parents telling you which anatomical portion can receive your nose rings. Okay. Let’s change something—say, the publication. Instead of sending your flyers out in the regional edition of The Christian Science Monitor, you switch to a heavy metal magazine. Now you get two hundred calls, and these are all from kids wanting nose rings.

What changed the result?

You changed a variable.

VARIABLES DEFINED

A campaign is made up of variables.

A common definition for variable is: “a quantity that may assume any one of a set of values” (Merriam-Webster Online).

That’s fine, but let’s give it a precise marketing definition: A variable is anything over which you have control that can change the outcome of a direct-response campaign.

In our nose ring campaign, a variable is your list—in this case, the people who read the publication you are using to distribute your flye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Also by Bill Good
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• BOOK ONE: The Good Way to Prospect
• BOOK TWO: Lead Generation
• BOOK THREE: Lead Development