Take time to research a prospect's history

In a recent selling skills program a couple of questions came up to which there is no one right answer.

1. How much time should we spend learning about clients?

2. How do we dress when meeting with clients/prospects?

The answer to both of these questions is the same. "It depends."

Anyone who spends time talking to me about selling knows I continually stress that we must make more effort to know our clients better.

We must truly learn and understand what is important to them -- in their life, their work, their role in the community and their legacy.

Learn about anything and everything that matters to them. And how those things may affect our ability to serve them as clients.

So, it makes sense that this thorough insight takes time to acquire. With many clients to serve, goals to meet and a limited amount of time to get everything done, determining how much time to spend on any activity is crucial to success.

The best way to determine how much time you truly need to spend learning about your clients and prospects is to review the results of your past experiences.

A numbers game

The phrase, "sales is a numbers game," is well known. The phrase is usually translated to mean, "If I contact a lot of prospects, I'll hit enough with real interest to make the sales I need."

Frankly, to me that sounds like a lot of very hard and boring work. The real meaning of the phrase is much more strategic and much more predictable.

"Sales is a numbers game" is really an exhortation to sales people to look at their numbers and learn from them. To use the information hidden among their numbers to make better choices and to improve outcomes by increasing their effectiveness.

Analyzing sales numbers enables sales professionals to decide:

• How to spend their time.
• With whom to spend their time.
• How much time to spend with each client/prospect.
• What products to focus on with which clients.

Almost everything they need to know to build their business is hidden in the numbers.

In this slowing economy, taking some time to get a grip on what the numbers are telling us could be one of the most important tasks to undertake.

10 questions

Simply begin by asking these questions about your top 10 clients.

1. How did I find them? (referral, trade show, cold call, they called me…)

2. What was my process for securing their initial business?

3. How many contacts/interactions did we have before they placed their first order?

4. Who were they buying from before me?

5. What influenced their decision to buy from me?

6. What influenced them to grow their account with me to be a top 10 account?

7. Do they still buy from my competitors? (Why and what do they buy from them?)

8. What do they buy from me? How often do they buy? What margin? (the transaction stuff)

9. How profitable is the account? (Or what is the potential for profit?)

10. Does the profitability of the account exceed the cost of winning/keeping their business?

When you have the answers to these questions regarding your top 10 you may see a pattern emerging of elements that tend to be present where you are most successful.

Use the information

As you plan your future actions you can use this information to target your activities, actions and processes to prospective clients or market sectors where all or several of the same elements are present.

There are many more questions that could be added to the list to help you hone your criteria to a highly predictable system.

The questions presented here are demographic. Understanding the psychographics of your clients could be of equal value:

• What makes your clients tick?
• What rouses their passions?
• What are their values?

As a purveyor of sales training and coaching services, I have learned that employers and organizations who invest in their community have a higher propensity to invest in the training and development of their staff.

Therefore, one of the many things I review when I receive a referral or inquiry, is the organization's community involvement. If they are highly engaged, I commit much more time and energy to my research about them than if they appear not to be so involved.

I know from analyzing past experiences that there is a greater likelihood of success, and therefore the investment of effort on my part is warranted.

So… how much time should you spend learning about the client? It depends on what your experiences tell you has been worthwhile in the past.

As to question number two. What should you wear? That's a whole new conversation but the rule of thumb is it's better to be too formal than too informal.

But it really does depend on who you're meeting and where.

Jacqui Sakowski is president of Sakowski Consulting, a Middleton-based sales coaching, training and consulting company.