Introduction

Being a great Sales Manager and Business Development Manager will always require the ability to find new customers.  You will need to be innovative and creative, able to think on your feet and quick witted.  Throw in a great level of knowledge about your products and services and the industry that you are selling into and you will be fine.

There is one attribute that sets great Sales Managers aside from others. This is their understanding that focusing effort on the right prospects is key to long term success.  I personally believe that a Salesperson should always be prospecting.  To prospect effectively you will need to focus your time and here is why.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle is a great starting point.  For those that have not heard of this Principle it states that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers.  Therefore, if you are spending 100% of your time on sales 80% of it is spent chasing 20% of your business.  The logical conclusion is that you should therefore spend 80% of your time working on the 20% that are worth chasing.

Unlike the thoughts of many Sales Managers, being great at sales is not about activity. Nor is it about hitting KPI’s based around call or meeting levels.  It is about finding quality prospects and customers and focusing your attention on them.  Creating high quality touch points throughout a well defined and structured sales process.

The only KPI a Salesperson should be aiming to hit is their sales target!

Quality from the Start

Quality needs to feed from the beginning of the Sales process while you are Prospecting. As a result it demands that the salesperson spends time researching customers.  When you do make that initial contact, you need to know who you are talking to. You will also need to know what their pressures are and how you can add value to their day.  All these things tie together to finding that one in five prospects that will create the vast proportion of your sales.

These are my top places where I look for and research about new prospects:

• Customers (Referrals in Particular)
• Networking Events
• Press (specifically trade publications)
• Social Media platforms such as LinkedIN, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter

There is a plethora of tools available to assist you with your search and a further list of these can be found here.

This article is focused purely focused on a few outbound sales techniques, there is plenty that can be done to generate an inbound sales pipeline too.  You can find more about that in our marketing blogs.  Let me know your thoughts by leaving comments.