Maximize your sales by selecting the right prospects

It does not matter how good our product is, how well known our company is, or how good we are as salespeople, not everyone can or wants to buy our products, so our offers will be rejected many times before we close a sale.

If for every 10 people (i.e. prospects) to whom we make a sales presentation, we close 1 sale, that means we have a 10% closing rate. Therefore, if we want to close 5 sales each month, we will have to visit 50 prospects. In many of the big cities, this task is practically impossible because the travel times between one appointment and another are very long. So how can I sell more if I can't visit that many people? The answer is by making sales presentations to the right prospects.

So, what are the characteristics of the right prospect?

They must have the need.

A good prospect is a person who has a specific need that our product can satisfy. If we are lucky, the prospect will know he has this need and will most likely be looking for someone to fulfill it. On the other hand, if the prospect does not know he has the need but we do, our main task will be to show him what our product can do for him and the benefit he will get by buying from us.

They must be interested in our product.

If the prospect is not interested in our product because, although he has the need, it is not one of his priorities, it will be much more difficult to close a sale with him. This is why we must select the people who are most interested in our products.

They must have money to buy from us.

All of the above will fail if our prospect does not have the financial means to purchase our product. A person may need to buy our product and be very interested in it, but we are lost if he does not have the money to buy it. We will hardly make progress in the negotiation to close the sale.

They must have the power of decision.

I have met many salespeople who make excellent sales presentations and have completely convinced their prospects that your product is what they were looking for to solve their needs, and they know that money is not an issue because the prospect has let them know so; but when it comes time to decide, they sadly realize that they worked with the wrong person because they are not the decision maker in the company... and then they find out that the real decision maker is already making a deal with your competition.

There is nothing more frustrating than working hard with a person, doing our best, spending time preparing the most impactful information to present to a prospect, and then realizing we wasted our time.

Stop working like an impromptu salesperson and start doing professional sales work. Before visiting a prospect, you should do a lot of research to find out if the prospect has the need, the interest, the money, and the decision-making power. If a prospect does not meet one of these four characteristics, the probability of closing will be lower and we will surely be wasting our time.

So, from now on, spend more time finding quality prospects, and magically your sales will at least double, allowing you to have an increase in revenue and a substantial decrease in the amount of unproductive work. This way, instead of needing to see 50 prospects to close 5 sales, we will have to visit only 25, making our work highly productive and raising our income considerably.