There aren’t many certainties in selling. What works well for one person can be a dead end for another, and what looks like a sure sale can easily deteriorate into a missed opportunity. One thing you can count on, however, is that a lack of strong, qualified leads will always be a stumbling block on the way to new business.

In that way, prospecting and lead generation are somewhat unique activities. While you can be a strong presenter, closer, or negotiator, none of that will ever matter if you don’t have enough leads to work with. And yet, coming up with a full sales pipeline is a constant challenge for sellers in every field and industry.

Here are a few of the common reasons why and the keys to getting past them.

Prospecting and selling are different skills: Great salespeople aren’t always great lead generators. They may be fantastic account managers, or perfect when it comes to closing warm leads, but struggle to find new opportunities from scratch.

Nobody likes awkward conversations: There are entire books and seminars devoted to “cold call reluctance,” and they all come down to the same thing: nobody likes calling strangers and asking for business. Most of us don’t enjoy receiving those calls, and so you certainly don’t relish making them!

A full pipeline can lead to an empty cupboard: When do sellers concentrate most on prospecting? When they don’t have enough sales opportunities in the works. The moment they do, they cast prospecting aside for activities that are more enjoyable.  Then it’s only a matter of time before they’re back at square one – with no new leads to pursue.

Looking at this short list, it’s easy to see why sellers have so much trouble finding enough leads. Prospecting and lead generation just don’t fit in with most of our skill sets and motivations.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t overcome these prospecting challenges!

The real secret to beating them – and ensuring a steady flow of new business in your pipeline – is in understanding that the keys to prospecting are discipline and the right message.

The need for discipline, as often as it comes up in sales, is relatively straightforward: you just have to commit yourself to prospecting on a fixed, regular schedule and be accountable to it.

There’s no secret.

You simply have to understand that it works over the long term, start doing it, and keep going even when your pipeline seems full. Don’t stop!

Because this is so important, a key component of any successful selling strategy has to be monitoring and accountability. It’s up to you, either as the seller or person in charge of overseeing sales, to be sure that daily, weekly, and quarterly targets are hit. Otherwise, it’s only a matter of time before you run out of leads.

Having the right message is just as critical.

One reason so many of us hate receiving prospecting calls is that we don’t really trust the sellers on the other end. In other words, we get the distinct feeling that they’re more interested in our money than our needs.

But there’s no rule that says that’s how you have to make your calls and introductions.

Instead of being “just another seller,” distinguish yourself by finding out exactly why your customers do business with you. What do they love about you? How have your solutions changed their business?

Use that information to create a genuine message. Doing so not only makes you more comfortable with the process of finding and approaching new potential clients. It also allows you to start better conversations, ones that are focused on prospects’ needs, and the value you can bring them, rather than your offerings.

Prospecting has been a challenge for sellers since the invention of commerce. By focusing on discipline and the right message you can keep a steady flow of new business coming in like clockwork.

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert and author of the award winning book “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment. Ms. Lee is a frequent speaker at national sales meetings and association events. To find out more about the author, read her latest articles, or to subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call +1 303.741.6636.

Your prospects are now doing more with less. They’re doing the job of several people and are more stressed out than ever and that means that prospects are much less easily reached than ever before.

Prospects are also less willing to engage; it’s a nightmare, they can find a lot of what they need on the Internet.

Is this your experience too? Are you struggling more now to fill your sales funnel? Are you wondering where your next customers are coming from? Is this completely stressing you out?

Stress no longer!

There’s a well known rule in sales (and in business) called Pareto’s law. It’s also known as the 80/20 rule.

It works like this:

• You will get 80% of your sales revenue from 20% of your customers
• 20% of your sales team will bring in 80% of your sales revenue
• 80% of your sales team will bring in the remaining 20% of the sales revenue

This rule applies throughout business too:

• 80% of productivity will come from 20% of the employees
• 80% of problems will come from 20% of customers
• And so on…

Pareto’s law can be applied to prospecting as well. If you’re new to sales and need to develop your pipeline, then you should be spending 80% of your time prospecting. Once you have a full sales funnel (and if you’ve done this consistently for 3-6 months, you should). After that you need to be spending 20% of your time prospecting.

Here’s where the problem lies of course, most new sales people or business owners don’t spend that 80% of time up front building their sales funnel. And then they don’t spend that 20% of time consistently ensuring their funnel stays full.

That is why so many sales professionals, entrepreneurs and business owners struggle. That’s why so many experience that ‘boom and bust’ cycle. They have no business in the pipeline they panic and frantically start prospecting. They get a few new customers, feel safe again and stop. Then those projects are done and there’s nothing in the pipeline…so guess what? Yep, they panic and start frantically prospecting again.

The key to never, ever having to experience ‘boom and bust’ is to prospect consistently, every day, no matter what, you need to make time or outsource it.

A sales funnel can be developed in many ways, e.g.:

• Cold calling
• Networking
• Referral selling
• Social media

The important point is that no matter what else is going on with you or in your business you take the time to look for new business every single day.

If you need more help building your pipeline, then contact me today.

It can be impossible to tell one company from another when they sell virtually identical products or services and that can be a real challenge when convincing your prospects to buy your offerings over the competitions.

So you’ll need to show them how you are different, which isn’t always easy, but when you do it will often change the whole dynamics of your business and galvanise the management and staff like nothing else could.

Don’t merely look at what you do and how you do it now – because if you can’t find one, you’ll need to create one and that will mean looking at what you could offer that’s different to the competition.

Get really creative with it and brainstorm it with your team. Get a professional in to help with this, someone who’ll be objective and who will push and prod and drag any and every angle out of you and your resources.

Look very closely at all the features of all your products and/or services, how and why you do what you do and could it be done better, cheaper, faster. Maybe there’s a common feature in some of your competitors products that would lend itself to being fashioned into the driving force of your USP.

Remember! Your customers are only interested in what’s in it for them. So your USP must offer them a benefit to achieve the greatest impact. You mustn’t get your features mixed up with your benefits either; a simple example might be: ‘we’re open 24-hours’ [feature] ‘allows you to shop when it’s convenient to you’ [benefit].

It may not be easy but once you’ve created your USP you will see a remarkable boost in your sales and if it’s strong enough, which it should be, it will become the whole ethos of your business.

Start revolutionising your business today, hire me to help you brainstorm and develop your company’s USP.

When you approach a new prospect, what do you have to offer? Whether you’re sending an email or cold calling, you need to grab the attention of your contact and make them want to talk with you. But too often sellers spew on about their product or lead off with a trap question that screams sales person.

The solution to this prospecting dilemma used to be to start your discussion as a business conversation rather than a traditional semi-scripted cold call. You based it on needs you uncovered in research before ever approaching your prospect.

But even that isn’t enough any more.

Business owners and executives are busy people, with too many responsibilities, too little time, and too few staff to pick up the slack. They don’t have time for a conversation unless it will help them do their job more efficiently and effectively.

Too often the prospecting business discussion is one designed to gather a prospect’s needs and covertly qualify if an opportunity exists. While you begin the conversation discussing the business issue you uncovered in your research, it quickly deteriorates into a series of questions that feel much like a sales call.

Your contact ends the conversation without agreeing to a first appointment and you don’t know why.

You never mentioned your product and you were only talking about them. So what happened? It used to work. What changed?

If you want to catch your prospects’ attention, you must go beyond even the business discussion. You have to have something important to talk with them about, something that feels almost life changing for them.

Here’s how it works.

1.    Know your purpose. In your first call or email, your purpose isn’t to close for an appointment. I know you’re shocked, but it isn’t. Rather, it’s simply to have a conversation to get to know each other, begin building a relationship, and see if you should have a meeting.

While you’re feeling the pressure to fill your pipeline this moment, many of the people you’ll speak with won’t be ready to make any immediate changes. But if you leave a positive impression as a thoughtful, intelligent person who may be able to help their business in the future, they’ll want to stay in touch. That gives you a lead for 3, 6 or 9 months from now.

Better still, they’ll probably call you because they’ll remember your discussion.

2.    Offer to share your expertise freely. Research is important but it’s how you apply it that is truly distinguishes you. Determine the business issue you could assist with, then offer your expertise on what they should be thinking about to address that point.

Don’t hold back because you think a prospect should pay for your advice.

Few companies you speak with will be able to implement your suggestions without your company’s help. Let go of that concern and open up. Share the great knowledge you have.

If you have ideas about how a company could better control their IT costs, tell them. Some will be recommendations that directly connect to your offerings, but others should not. If, for example, during your discussion you believe that some basic training would help their office manager to administer better system back-ups, tell them. You can sell them a full-scale business recovery solution later.

Guide them with ideas they can implement right now while positioning what you can assist with in the future.

3.    Make them think about the possibilities. As you share, discuss what you’ve seen other companies do to address a similar problem. Think about your clients, the challenges they’re facing and what they’re doing about those problems.

Show prospects the possibilities of what they could be doing to improve productivity, cut costs, or address that need you uncovered in your research.

Share one or two simple-to-implement ideas, as well as one or two more complex, suggestions. Base your ideas on how you’ve observed your clients address those matters in their organizations, or how they have implemented your solutions to change their businesses.

The executives you’re calling are so busy they haven’t had time to consider other possibilities. They’re surviving with the issues when they may not have to.

4.    Help them re-examine their status quo. By not pushing prospects into a change with your first call, you’re freeing them up to rethink their status quo. Your conversation of suggestions and possibilities allows them to take time out and think for a moment about what could be.

Suddenly training the office manager may not be enough. They may want your recommendation on how they can protect their business during hurricane season, or secure their data, or better manage their whole IT infrastructure.

They won’t want to wait 3 or 6 months to talk again. They’ll want to pick your brain some more and consider ways to eliminate the issues they’ve been living with now that they know they don’t have to.

I know, you’re thinking that this sounds like a deeper conversation than you usually conduct in a cold call. And, you’re concerned that you interrupted the person. They’d never stay on the phone for this type of discussion.

But, it works.

It works because you’ve grabbed your prospect’s attention and made them want to talk with you. After a conversation like this, they either want to schedule time for a deeper conversation, or they want to hear from you again sometime soon.

You can solve your prospecting dilemma but elevating your conversation to one based on your expertise and ideas. Before you know it, not only will your pipeline increase, but your relationship database of potential new prospects will be overflowing, too.

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert and author of the award winning book “Selling Against the Goal” and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment. Ms. Lee is a frequent speaker at national sales meetings and association events. To find out more about the author, read her latest articles, or to subscribe to her newsletter visit www.klagroup.com or call +1 303.773.1285.

If your business is running along quite nicely under it’s own steam, you may wonder what a mentor would add to your situation.

As an entrepreneur, you often just don’t have the experience and skill sets to handle everything that gets chucked at you during the hectic life of running the average business; so why not take advantage of every offer of help there is?

A fresh pairs of eyes that sees without the restrictions of emotional ties will identify issues and opportunities not always realised when working so close to the business.

The point is that a good mentor has already probably dealt with all the issues you are currently facing, and many times, which means you don’t necessarily need to go through the often expensive learning curve on your own; after all they will have already developed and run successful businesses themselves, often many times over.

The relationship developed with a good mentor will give you access to a springboard for bouncing off your ideas as well as gaining suggestions and fresh inspiration for you and your business that can move you forward with more confidence.

This is especially worthwhile in a start-up situation where perhaps you are transferring from employment to self-employment and you need to assess where the most energy will be put to best use; such as setting targets and deadlines.

When a new company is starting out or an emerging business is forging new paths, a mentor can prove invaluable with their influence and access to networks and contacts particularly in certain business environments and industries where they may have established many years credibility.

The list of potential benefits a mentor could bring to your business is endless. All kinds of value can be brought to a business depending often upon the individual requirements of the entrepreneur; however, you can be certain of one thing, a strong relationship with a mentor could really help your business thrive.

If you would like to explore the possibilities of getting a mentor working for you and your business, contact me now.