The Importance of Prospecting For New Business | Sales Prospecting Skills

People in business will lose a percentage of their customers however successful those businesspeople are, however good their service is, and however well the product is priced. There are many reasons why customers are lost: people move away or die, products become obsolete, sales are lost to a competitor, businesses are taken over or go bust or, very importantly, changes take place in market trends and buying behaviour.

Let me give you some examples of buying behaviour or products reaching the end of a life cycle. The market for typewriters virtually dried up due to the computer. Videos have been replaced by DVDs and cassettes by CDs. Salespeople therefore should be at the forefront of spotting market place changes, and feed this information back to their employers. What were the Kodak people doing? Let me remind you again you must be customer led, what do your customers want, when and how?

One of the principles of professional salesmanship is that you as a salesperson should regard yourself as a businessperson in your own right. It must be your responsibility to get new business. You cannot merely wait for customer enquiries or leads provided from marketing or advertising. I learnt to my cost the risk of being passive, waiting and hoping for prospective customers to call, write or phone in. Now I never base my future on the success or failure of an advertising campaign. I believe it was Henry Ford who once said, ‘50 percent of my advertising works; I only wish I knew which 50 percent.’ So I have to find new business myself and my advice to you is that if you want to be a winner you have to have a good system or strategy for finding new business. And it must not be dependent upon the activity of somebody else.