Chuck Terry’s Blog

Of all the subjects on which I blog, speak, or discuss with clients, one of the most popular has to be prospecting.  How do we do it better?  How often?  Should we prospect at all?  I have fielded these (and more) prospecting themed questions frequently.  In general, sales professionals and leaders most often want to know how they can become more effective at developing new prospects for their company.  With that topic in mind, I thought I would share my most recent development or, more accurately, RE-development in the science of prospecting.

 In a past blog entitled “A New Way to Prospect”, I addressed the importance of leveraging your network of contacts, especially through electronic mediums, to be more targeted and time efficient in your business development efforts.  To supplement that information, I’ll share a more “old school” approach that has been working well in several of my firms which have employed it.  It is no less targeted or time efficient, but it requires a bit of advanced planning.

 The “Prospecting Power Hour” (PPH) concept is actually quite simple.  The PPH is dedicated time (an hour a week up to an hour per day) to make laser targeted strikes to a few, high yield targets.  This is in stark contrast to the “carpet bombing”  tactic typically employed in most prospecting initiatives, in which the salesperson tries to make as many calls as possible in an effort to cover a wide area.  The idea of PPH is to make fewer calls, concentrating on a tighter group of potential prospects.

 At this juncture it is worth clarifying the definition of “prospect” as it pertains to PPH.  I believe Webster’s interpretation as “an advance realization of something to come” is appropriate.  Said another way, a prospect is a potential client with enough qualification completed by the sales team to determine they should be actively pursued as a future client.

But the Prospecting Power Hour approach takes this definition one step further, asking each salesperson to rigorously apply their firm’s “best client” definition parameters to a VERY tight focus. The goal is for each salesperson to identify their top 25 (it certainly can be less but NOT more) prospects that fit that exacting “best client” definition to a “T” and which would absolutely make their year if they were able to convert them to customers.  Once this group of high potential prospects has been identified, every salesperson on the team spends their designated hour (again, frequency may vary) doing nothing but trying to convert the targeted prospects to customers.

 As I said earlier, PPH isn’t complicated.  But it is VERY effective, especially if you add the element of competition within your sales team.  Consider a sales contest around who has the most success each PPH session and/or each month, with some finite activity-based metrics.  Focusing the contest on activity-based goals instead of outcome-based goals is critical because you want to reward the hard work that goes into pursuing these types of prospects.  Examples of activity-based metrics would be things such as 1) who reached the most actual people during the calling session, 2) which rep got the most names of decision makers, 3) who set the most future appointments, etc.  The objective is to make the drudgery associated with prospecting a bit more fun by recognizing milestones in the process rather than only recognizing “wins.”

 Give the Prospecting Power Hour a try in your company and let me know how it works.  I am confident your sales team will have some fun, increase the effectiveness of their prospecting and go on to close more business.

Chuck Terry is the Executive Vice President and CSO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights

Carew International is a leader in sales training and leadership development; specializing in comprehensive, proven training programs for sales, sales management and customer service excellence. For over 30 years, Carew has earned its reputation of delivering increased productivity and profitability to our valued clients world wide.