Member Article

Sales Nugget – Having loads of opportunities is good but not that great

In the last few weeks I have been working with several new-start businesses. All of them have various skills and experience that may help them find success, but what they want most of all are customers. They are all at the prospecting stage of their business and need new customers to get started.

The problem when you are at this stage is you see every person you talk to as a potential customer. So, you treat everyone as a potential customer and you get excited about all of the opportunities building up in your sales pipeline. You keep everyone sweet and wait for the orders to come in and keep prospecting for more opportunities.

Prospecting is a very important part of a salesperson’s job and a new business, in fact it is essential! It is a very difficult activity but we can sometimes get side tracked generating new contacts and creating new opportunities but we must not forget the most important activity is winning sales.

So if you, like a couple of the new start businesses from last week, have lots of potential opportunities it may be time to take a look at them and dump a few of them. It is better to concentrate on those that you have a greater chance of winning.

So if you want make a big impact on your sales figures in the next month you have got to get better at qualifying opportunities and closing sales.

You have to prospect hard and qualify hard! This way you will make your life a lot easier and get positive results.

Prospecting is a waste of time if you qualifying criteria are non-existent. You have to qualify your opportunities so you are only dealing with prospects that are going to purchase and that there is a high percentage that they will buy off you.

Decide what your qualifying criteria are when dealing with a prospect. Most sales organisations work on a percentage change of winning an order. You do the same and decide the figure then only work with those opportunities that reach your target percentage.

There is a skill in qualifying your opportunities and there several areas to consider in your qualifying criteria however you must know the answer to these two key questions. The first is that you need know what is driving the deal. Is it to resolve an issue or problem or is it to achieve an aspiration. The second area is you need to know who is driving the deal and making the decision.

So learn to qualify hard and be prepared to walk away from some opportunities or you will waste your time with the wrong people

If you want help to increase your sales please contact us on 0191-2267366, email us at sales@arrowsales.co.uk or visit us at http://www.arrowsales.co.uk/

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Michael McMeekin .