We often overlook a profession that was at one time an integral player in our country’s development and movement west. Many great migrations were led by solitary individuals who walked around trying to find riches hidden from everyone else’s sight.
Prospectors searching for gold, oil, uranium, silver, and other resources served as catalysts for great hordes to follow, all anticipating riches beyond their wildest dreams. But it is important to recognize that prospecting is not the same as mining. Knowing how and where to look is not the same as knowing how and where to dig, move, store and process. Different skill sets with different metrics. This same differentiation applies to today’s world of prospecting in sales.
Most companies and salespeople know that the simple formula for increased success in selling is to increase exposure to the number of people who have the need and the ability to buy whatever product or service they are selling.
At its basic, this is sales prospecting. Yet as simple as it is obvious, it is the one area where many salespeople are negligent. Recognizing that you cannot make more minutes in the day, many amateurs choose to spend most of their precious minutes with existing customers. These existing customers represent a safe, inviting haven, one in which rejection is not to be found; one in which additional sales with little or no effort may someday appear. Suffice it to say that these folks are not long for a successful career in sales.
Recognizing the operational imperative of effective prospecting, companies and individuals spend a tremendous amount of money exploring better and cheaper methods of uncovering potential. At its core, however, almost all of these approaches leverage a creative skull session with a “wagon wheel family tree” to uncover and map these opportunities.