Sales Force One

POW Prospecting

The following is courtesy of Robb High at Robb High Associates in New York.  Have you ever experienced POW prospecting?

Avoid the “prisoner of war” syndrome.  The POW sits in his bamboo cage and when a bit of disgusting gruel is pushed through the bars says “I don’t want to eat this, but it could be the last food I’ll get for a while.  So I will.”  Agencies seem to react the same way toward new business opportunities.  They may know the client is “wrong.”  They know they are a long shot to win and that it will burn out the agency to try.  But they forge ahead anyway because they have no faith that other…better…opportunities are likely to come along.  Why no faith?  Because they are not doing any serious prospecting or prospect “dating” to make that happen.  Not having a serious prospecting plan is like not having fire insurance on your heavily mortgaged new house.

 

Driving on Road

I recently purchased a Garmin GPS receiver and I love it.  I did notice that it recently became stuck for just a moment and simply read "Driving on Road."

I wonder how many sales people have a Sales GPS telling them the same thing at the end of 2008...just driving or selling on the road...doing what they have always done...getting what they have always gotten.

One of the fiercest conversations you can have with yourself is to ask yourself why you have had the kind of sales year you have had in 2008.  If you have not had the kind of year you were expecting to have, do you know why?  Was it a lack of prospecting activity?  Was it a lack of focus?  Was it a lack of skill or technique? 

Whatever your circumstance, I hope the following for you:

1. You don't blame anything or anyone but yourself.

2. You can clearly identify what went wrong and have a plan to fix it.

Be Like Mike

Remember the the advertisements from when Michael Jordan was playing basketball?  They revolved around everybody wanting to be like Mike.

I spent a few days in Boston this past week and had dinner both nites in the north end section of downtown Boston - commonly referred to as Little Italy where I discovered a bakery on Hanover Street called Mike's Pastry.  Each nite the bakery was packed with people getting in the door at all hours of the night which had me concluding there was something so compelling about this bakery that caused people to stand in a line at 10PM to order a cannoli (ok so maybe more than one cannoli in my case).

What does this have to do with you?  Everything.  How compelling are you when you get in front of prospects?  In fact let's back up a step.  When you are talking with a prospect and find some pain, how compelling is it to the prospect?  I heard Dave Kurlan (President of Objective Management Group) speak this week and he offered an interesting distinction on the difference between pain and compelling reasons.  Dave suggested that prospects won't always fix pain...but they will generally fix issues when they have a compelling reason to do so.  Do you know the difference?  It comes down to asking the prospect this question:  "how compelling is that to you?"

As for the bakery, check this out:

www.mikespastry.com

I stood in line on Tuesday night and then again on Wednesday night.  That is pretty compelling.