Helping your team members create a surplus of opportunities

Hello Sales Reset Leader

Improving prospecting is the number one priority of almost all of our clients.

If your team members don’t have new prospects to speak with, they’re limited to speaking only with existing customers. And you know from experience that existing customer bases get smaller all the time for lots of reasons.

Finding and engaging new customers is crucial to every salesperson’s role.

The rest of this email newsletter assumes you have read this week’s first Weekly Sales Reset“:

• Title: Shifting the focus of your prospecting from quantity to quality

• Subtitle: How to give yourself the problem of having too many opportunities!

The newsletter's main focus is to encourage your team members to spend enough time deep-diving into their prospects before approaching them.

This week’s Weekly Sales Reset states a range of assumptions before detailing some prompts for deep-diving. Here are the assumptions we state:

1. Time: Your team members have budgeted enough time for prospecting.

2. ICP: They’ve clarified their ideal customer profile (ICP).

3. Organisations: They’ve identified enough organisations that fit their ICP.

4. Contacts: They’ve found the people in these organisations they need to approach through research on their websites, LinkedIn, and elsewhere.

5. Approach Methods: They’re skilled with the full range of ways to approach prospects

These are massive assumptions!! And undoubtedly incorrect!!

Each of your team members will be relatively weak in one or more of these areas.

When you consider each of your team members, how effective are they in these foundations of effective prospecting?

How to improve your team's results this week

• Where to look for evidence

• Expected pushback

• Role-Play Recommendations

• Strongly Recommended Book

• Invitation to Weekly Sales Reset Stories - LIVE! o …

Where to look for evidence

We strongly recommend reviewing the evidence before your coaching sessions with each team member. The evidence you find will make your coaching significantly more effective.

Before you meet with your team members for your 1:1 coaching sessions this week, here’s where to find the evidence you need. 

• Prospecting Analytics: What is the data on each team member’s prospecting? How many approaches, and what success ratios? How many new opportunities have been opened?

• Approach Emails: Review some of your team member’s approach emails. How effective are they? Are they generic or based on deep-dive insights?

• Call and Meeting Recordings: How effectively do your team members open the conversation? How good are they at getting the prospect to talk? How well do they use what they’ve learned to develop the conversation?

Expected pushback

So you know what to expect and can be prepared, here are three areas of possible pushback from your team members.

1. I don’t enjoy prospecting: Or maybe even “I hate prospecting!” How can you help every team member learn how to enjoy aspects of this crucial part of their job?

2. I don’t have enough time for prospecting: It’s undoubtedly a challenge to find time for prospecting, especially when a significant portion of this time is almost inevitably wasted.

3. I don’t have the research skills or the skills required for ALL the approach methods. This is precisely what you want to hear! This is your invitation to train and coach your team members!

What are your best responses now that you know these potential pushback areas?

Role-Play Recommendations

1. Best Current Prospect: Ask your team member for the details of the best prospect they’ve found and are about to approach. Role-play the approach conversation.

2. Prospecting Within Existing Customers: Ask your team members to choose a current customer where there are likely additional opportunities. Role-play these prospecting conversations.

3. Biggest Recent Prospecting Failure: Ask about a well-researched approach that has failed. Role-play the situation. The good news is that your team members can almost certainly use the insights developed in the role-play to have another go!

(You may find these recommendations about using role-play helpful.)

Strongly Recommended Book

We strongly recommend this book: Outbound Sales: A data-backed playbook for cold email, cold calling, social selling, and more

It was published only at the start of this month and effectively describes current best practices in prospecting.

It’s available for a very low price on Amazon and again, is highly recommended.

Invitation to Weekly Sales Reset Stories - LIVE! online

Starting this week, we’re running a weekly session in our FREE Sales Reset Together community from 16:30 to 17:15, UK time.

The session is designed to allow participants to share their experiences and stories about each Weekly Sales Reset theme. This week, the theme is prospecting.

We’ll be HUGELY interested to hear your experience and stories!

Click here to join the community and learn more about the session this coming Tuesday.

We hope you’ve found this edition of Sales Reset Leaders valuable.

Have a great week!

The Sales Reset Team

Do your team members subscribe to our companion weekly newsletter, Weekly Sales Reset?