Skillful prospecting is paramount to any sales person’s success. The trick is not to treat all prospects as equal. A big deal and a small deal will take the same amount of time and bandwidth to work and close. Therefore, spending time analyzing your market to identify the best prospects increase your chances of success. An efficient means to classify your market’s prospects is running, established criteria of current clients against your territory. After cross-referencing your territory prospects with the criteria index, you can start prioritizing the different opportunities in your market. Contextualizing your universe increases the likelihood of beating your goals. This exercise is six easy steps and only takes a few hours of your time to finish.
First, establish three to eight points of criteria that represent your top clients. The criteria should take into account your overall goal. If your goal is to bring in larger deals, use average deal size as a criterion to cross reference against your prospecting list. If you need to bring deals in quickly to show the viability of a new market or new product, you will look at average sales life cycle, ranking markets that prospects close quickly
Next, develop a rating system to align with the criteria. This rating system can be anything from 1 to 4 stars, hot to cold. Personally, I use 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, i.e. if I am using average deal size as criteria, all clients who have significant deal sizes will get a 5, and all clients who have small deal sizes will have a 1.
The third step is to match each of your prospects against your matrix. This gives you a score for each prospect. Once you have scores, sort the list by point totals. You can now effectively create tiers of clients based on the numbers. For example, my three clusters’ tiers may be clients who score 1-15, clients who score 16-30 and clients who score 30+.
As a fourth step, review each cluster to find similarities. What attributes do they all have in common? If you cannot find any commonalities in your groups, reevaluate your cluster. Sometimes you don’t see the similarities at first glance, but once you think through why each of those clients ranked high, it may become more apparent. Maybe that cluster has a single point of contact, perhaps they are in emerging markets, but I have never seen a group without some theme running through them.
Now that your universe is ranked the fifth step is to use the clusters to create a value proposition that will resonate with these targets. With these identified value propositions, the sixth and final step is to tailor your actions to the different groups.
Following these six steps will increase your win ratio, and help you focus your time on quality prospects.
