November 1, 2002
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| Who said getting new clients was going to be easy? |
| By Andrew Gagen |
Lately I’ve been hearing colleagues comment about how difficult it is to get new clients. They talk about how competitive things have become and how difficult it is to differentiate themselves from the sea of competition. When I ask them to describe their strategy for garnering the business of their top five prospects, however, many offer rather startling answers.
Surprisingly, many can’t even tell me who their top five prospects are. In other words, they don’t even know who they want to do business with. Based on this alone, I think their lack of results is not surprising. Of the few who can identify their prospects, I ask the following: What have you been doing to get them as customers? More often than not, they have made some prospecting attempts, but those attempts are half-hearted, unfocused and offer little value to the client, typically eliciting a “we don’t need any” response.
When helping people determine why they’re having such lackluster results from a sales perspective, I invariably find the following:
- Salespeople call on too many accounts, and therefore don’t have enough time to call on those accounts often enough to be successful.
- Salespeople don’t spend enough time with the accounts that provide the best opportunity for growth.
- Salespeople spend too much time calling on low-potential accounts.
- Salespeople don’t realize how precious few sales call they have to invest each month so they do not invest their time very wisely.
- Salespeople think that if a semi-attractive account is in their territory they have to call on that account. Not true! Spend your time only where it will count. Territory management is an issue for FedEx and the U.S. Postal service, not salespeople.
The bottom line is, while each account is unique and may surprise you with a great sale, you can’t expect to gain a multi-million dollar account by making 24 cold calls and going on two appointments over a six-month period. In other words, you can’t get something for nothing.
You can, however, get something for personal account service, relationship building and sales effort monitoring. When building relationships, use this rule as a guide: It takes at least 10 appointments to break into a new Fortune 1000 account. This next line is so important you should read it twice: If it takes 10 appointments to make a prospect a client, then it is better to completely ignore a prospect than go on 9 appointments as the results would be the same! Does this mean you should ignore potential clients, though? Of course not. Just be sure to follow through on your efforts when you make them and invest enough time to cross the finish line or don’t bother entering the race.
While building relationships, you need to track your activity to determine what your call-to-client ratio is. If it takes you 10 appointments to get a client, then your call-to-client ratio is 10:1. If your salespeople make 108 appointments with 12 prospective accounts, a 9:1 ratio, then they probably won’t make any sales. Don’t let your salespeople drive 90 miles when they need to go 100 for success – encourage them to follow through and develop that relationship.
Successful salespeople have a sense of purpose and focus their energy and time on accounts that they know are worth pursuing. And then they keep pursuing them until they are successful in gaining their business.
As the saying goes, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Don’t let a lack of results trick you into saying “I think I will try getting some business from someone else since I am not having any luck over here.” It takes a lot of time and effort to build name recognition, a reputation, and for people to associate you and your company with a specific product or service. The only way to go from an outsider to an insider is to pay the price of time and effort, and to be sure you continually offer value to the client.
Even though competition may be tough, and closing sales may be tougher, it isn’t impossible. Instead of seeking a quick sale with little effort, dig in, focus and commit to building a relationship with potential clients. Though it may seem a slow process at first, after awhile you’ll find this deliberate approach always wins, much like the tortoise always outruns the hare.
Andrew Gagen
is Co-Founder and Senior Vice President of InfoStaff, an
I.T. staffing company that he built from the ground up with his wife Tedd.
Andrew serves as President of the Independent Computer Consultants Association
in Chicago and has spent his entire 20-year career in sales and marketing.
He can be reached at andrew@infostaff.com.
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