Prospecting: Tips for Digging to Find Sales Gold

So, what happens when you can’t get a prospect to do business with you? We’ve all been there. After countless calls, meetings and work, you just can’t get the customer to say yes and move forward. It’s hard to give up when you’ve invested so much time. But ultimately, you must determine if the prospect is truly a prospect or nothing more than a lost lead.

One solution is to try to include the potential customer in the buying process. Getting prospects involved can help facilitate moving the sale along. If they refuse to get involved, they’re likely not going to buy from you.

Here’s a good way to test their interest: After a meeting or conversation with them, ask them to do something as a follow up. Perhaps you can ask them to review something for you, either an email or something on a Web site. If they take the time to respond, chances are they are still interested in doing business with you.

I used this with a new builder we were trying to get to use our company. He said he was looking for a new cabinet company to do business with; as long as it met similar price comparisons to his usual supplier, he’d be happy to make the switch.

After much back and forth and weeks of estimating one job over and over, I was starting to think he was using us as a market pricing gauge. So after no real sense of commitment, I reached out to him and drove him to our Web site under the guise of showing him a picture of a similar project’s door style, color selection and design detailing to see if this was what he was looking for with the project we had quoted. He obliged, and we spoke in length about the similarities between the projects. This gave me some hope that he was still interested.

Not only did it solidify our abilities to execute, but it related a finished project with a project he was working on. It turns out he had asked the homeowner to view our Web site and that project in particular. They did eventually go to our Web site, and they, too, shared the vision of the similarities between their project and the one we finished that was close in design. As a result, we eventually got the job.

I know this is not a foolproof way to determine if the client is serious, but it can be very effective.

So, at the end of the day, keep your prospecting at the forefront of your mind, regardless of how busy you feel. Concentrate on ways to help turn those prospects into customers by using your skills to determine which prospects will become clients and which prospects you will move on from. The only sales you’re going to close are going to be with prospects who show interest in what you’re providing and confidence in how you’re providing it.