5-Minute Selling

CHAPTER 24CALL PROSPECTS

Your prospective customers are currently suffering through the competition. Rescue them.

In this chapter, I am combining all three common kinds of prospects that we should be making phone calls to. I'd like to talk about them in a way that makes a single chapter most helpful.

There is a great irony in the sales profession: experienced, successful salespeople do not call on prospects very much. We spend nearly all of our time with existing customers.

WHY EXPERIENCED SALESPEOPLE SPEAK NEARLY EXCLUSIVELY TO CUSTOMERS, NOT PROSPECTS

The reasons for this are multitudinous:

1. Current customers call us all day long, but prospects do not. Current customers bring us their orders, questions, problems, and urgent matters. Prospects do not.
2. For experienced salespeople, the vast majority of our business comes from current customers. The repeat orders? By definition, they come from current customers.
3. It's easier to sell to customers than prospects, right? They know us, and we know them. We have a relationship. They have an account. They may have credit with us. It's easier to refill a prior order, or add to it, than to sell an order for the first time.
4. When we go visit our customers in person, we tend to go to the ones already buying, rather than the ones not yet buying. We spend time with the customers who are currently paying our bills, not the ones who might one day pay the bills.

But these things are only true for experienced salespeople: only those of us ...