If you ask most people in the sales business this question they will tell you something like “the purpose of prospecting is to get people to give you an appointment.” They think that their job is to try and convince people to give them an appointment. They think if they can make enough appointments and talk to enough people then everything will work out fine. They also will tell you “sales is a numbers game.” See enough people and make enough presentations and you will close enough deals. That is so old school. That paradigm went out in the 1970’s. Unfortunately, most companies, and sales managers still believe and teach that approach. That is why there is so much turnover and failure in the sales profession.
Think about it. If your goal in sales is to talk to x number of people and to set y number of appointments to close z number of deals, what happens when you fail to achieve that goal. You feel like a lousy, miserable failure. No matter how strong your ego you can only take so much. So what should you do?
Develop a new paradigm that prospecting is the culling out or disqualifying of suspects. If you start trying to disqualify people and you start getting a lot of “NO’S” you are then achieving your goal. You can feel good about yourself. We call this going for the “NO.”
The objective of prospecting is to eliminate those who have no need, no urgency, or no money for your product or service. Most sales people try to qualify when what they should be doing is trying to disqualify as many suspects as they can. Funny thing is when you adopt this attitude you stop wasting time, become more relaxed and start getting more “Yeses”. It really is a paradox.
