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I am in the fortunate position of receiving many reader questions submitted from the Contact Me page. For today’s post I’d like to answer a question that was submitted to me by Richard F. of Denver, Colorado, with his permission.

“I like reading your blog and many in our office are regular readers. Why do you make such a big deal about prospecting? I’ve been with my company for about a year and am meeting my sales objectives most of the time without doing any prospecting. Why should I care about prospecting?”

Richard,

There are primarily four reasons that we prospect and I think all of them could be applicable to your situation.

1. We prospect because we lose customers. It’s inevitable. No matter how good we are, we will, over time, lose all of our customers for one reason or another. Since you have only been at your employer for a year you most likely haven’t seen significant customer fallout yet. Now is the time to start planting seeds to replace those customers that will ultimately start to wither and die.

2. We prospect to replace bad customers. We only have a limited number of hours in a day. Why would we want to budget our time around customers that are high maintenance, buy little and pay slowly? When we find better customers through prospecting we become more efficient selling machines by using high quality new customers to replace existing bad ones.

3. We prospect because order-takers make less income than consultative sales professionals. If all we do is process orders, we aren’t particularly valuable to our employers. Order taking is a bad habit we don’t want to get too comfortable with either.

4. We prospect to bring in new business in order to increase our sales and therefore increase our personal earnings (commissions). It appears that there might be some periods when you don’t hit your sales quota. Finding new business could help you hit your target more often and increase your income.

Thank you for your question, Richard. I’ve never seen a superstar salesperson that was successful over an extended period because of their order-taking capabilities. They did it because they had well developed sales skills and they were always looking for better customers to either add to their book of accounts or to replace undesirable customers.

Scott

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Tags: habits, Prospecting, prospects

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