What to Do?
Finding The Right Prospects:
One of the most important ways you can build your new business is through prospecting. Think of prospecting as the first essential step on your path to building a strong relationship with your clients and growing your business. Prospecting isn’t the boogey man some folks think. If you practice, practice, practice your prospecting skills, it will become one of your best business building tools!
What is prospecting?
Think of a big lawn that you’re about to weed. On the surface everything looks pretty good, but you know that there are weeds hiding in the turf. You want to get rid of the weeds so that the real grass can grow. That’s what you do when you’re prospecting! Everyone you approach is not going to be someone you want on your team. When you start out, you are going to be
contacting people you know and even more people you don’t know. Your prospecting task will be to separate the good prospects from the bad ones.
Where do prospects come from?
The obvious pat answer is—everywhere. I know a mortgage broker who does a lot of prospecting on the golf course. It’s a tough life but somebody’s got to lead it. Once you learn the right questions to ask and practice, practice, practice, it will become second nature to you. But for the sake of brevity I will mention a few good prospecting venues:
• Inquiries on your own Web site
• Purchasing opt-in lists from reputable sources
• Anyone who has purchased your product
• Civic club or business club acquaintances
• Newspaper ads and trade journal ads
• Friends and family
• Referrals from customers and people you know
I hope I’ve given you some ideas to build on.
Remember this, prospecting is a two step process: first, making many contacts, then, narrowing them down to only the GOOD prospects.
Three Questions On Every Prospect’s Mind:
here’s an important prospecting principle that you should keep in mind as you build your business. Prospecting is all about getting
an appointment. Remember when I said that prospecting and selling are not the same thing? Now I’m going to explain what I meant. As you speak with people, you don’t want to waste valuable time on selling or training a dead end prospect. So, successful marketers have developed effective ways to extract the best prospects from that crowd of contacts. That’s what I’m going to share with you today. While you definitely WANT to lose a poor prospect you don’t want to lose even one good prospect. So, pay close attention!
If you want to get an appointment with the GOOD prospects every time there are three basic questions you will have to answer. While no one will actually come out and ask you these questions, I promise you these are the questions that will decide if this prospect will agree to an appointment with you. At this point they don’t want to hear details about your products or services. They don’t want to hear details about how many sales the company has made in the last year. In order to get an appointment, here’s all they need to know:
1. What is your business and can I see myself doing it?
2. How much money can I make?
3. Is it doable without having to make big changes in my life?
That’s it in a nutshell. The great thing is you can answer these questions in as little as 60 seconds. No kidding. In the next menu option “What to say” I’m going to give you an actual conversation technique that will get you an appointment in 60 seconds, with the right prospect.
But for now I’d like to give you an assignment that will pay big dividends in the future.
First, I’d like you to come up with 2 or 3 ways to describe the business—describe what you do—in one sentence. One sentence. Write down 2 or 3 of these descriptions and practice saying them until they slip off your tongue with ease.
Second, I want you to get on the company Web site and memorize the pay out plan. I don’t mean every detail of the plan. But set an imaginary earnings goal on paper and then note down how much product you would have to sell and how many referrals you would need to make in order to meet that goal. Set one small goal (like $300 a month) and one large goal (like $3000 a month) and find out what it would take to achieve those goals. Memorize that information until you can spit it out without a pause.
Finally, I need to you put down in writing what makes you excited about this business. Be specific. What exactly is it that causes your enthusiasm for what you hope to achieve? Is it peace of mind? Meeting new people or helping people achieve their goals? Making extra money in your spare time? Giving people a product or service that really helps them? The chance to work at home? The potential to earn an unlimited income? Write it all down and practice putting it into 2 or three sentences that feel natural to say out loud.
When you can do these three things you will be able to answer the three important questions the good prospects need to know before they agree to an appointment with you.
Ok, you’ve got enough to do right now.
