Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Prospect only qualified Leads

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Prospect only qualified Leads: You can never expect to consistently exceed your sales targets, unless you learn the art of utilising your available time as effectivel...

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Prospect only qualified Leads

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Prospect only qualified Leads: You can never expect to consistently exceed your sales targets, unless you learn the art of utilising your available time as effectivel...

Prospect only qualified Leads

You can never expect to consistently exceed your sales targets, unless you learn the art of utilising your available time as effectively as possible every day. Time is a limited resource, which when invested wisely will allow you to achieve remarkable results and when wasted, will keep you trapped in average. Chasing after every possible lead or prospect, without first qualifying them, is as effective as screaming at an approaching tornado and demanding it go away. If you do not qualify prospects, you just spend your day spinning your wheels and may on occasion hit pay dirt, but more often than not, you are going to just waste time and achieve very little. 

Know your value proposition

It is impossible to qualify a lead or prospect, if you are not 100% clear on what you offer or how this will benefit your lead or prospect. You can never sort through viable prospects or leads and chose the ones you will invest time into winning over as customers, unless you know whether what you offer will serve them in the first place. Clarify what you offer, become clear on what benefits it brings to your customers and you will save yourself hours every day sorting through possible leads and qualifying prospects. The effort you put into qualifying prospects and leads saves you wasted effort as you will only invest resources into the right people, who need exactly what you have to offer. 

Prospects are like you; they also have a limited amount of time available and do not want their time to be wasted by people, who try to sell them something, which cannot completely satisfy their needs. They only want to know what is in it for them and whether your value proposition will satisfy this. When you are properly prepared and you know exactly what your value proposition offers and how this will serve the prospect, they will very quickly see your competence and this will turn into confidence and finally they will begin to trust you offer. As you know people only buy from people they know, like and trust. They can and never will learn to like or trust anyone, who is unprepared, does not know their own value proposition and tries to wing it. 

Convert Qualified leads into Sales 

Qualified leads and prospects are the fuel, which drives the sales engine and in turn drives revenue, within any organisation. So any sales professional, who wants to consistently exceed their sales targets, needs to spend sufficient time researching every prospect, until they get a crystal clear picture of what the prospects needs are, how their value proposition will satisfy this and how they can partner with the prospect and develop a mutually beneficial relationship with them. The more prepared you are before every sales call and the more clear you are about the purpose for each call is, the more your prospect will sense your preparedness and they will quicker they will warm to you and your offering.

Turning your Qualified Prospect into a Customer

According to Everett Rogers, who published a book called “Diffusion of Innovation”, turning a prospect into a customer goes through five distinct phases – awareness, interest, evaluation, trail and finally adoption. Your knowledge about your value proposition and the research you have done around the needs of the prospect and the decision maker put you in a powerful position to start moving your prospect down the path from a place where they become aware of your value proposition, to a place where they finally adopt or purchase your product or service.

Creating Awareness

If you are working with a targeted prospect, who you have carefully selected, because of their perfect fit for what you have to offer. There is no better way of connecting with them, than arranging a face to face call with them, to introduce yourself and your value proposition. As you know this is not always possible as the decision makers often have gatekeepers, who make reaching them extremely difficult. This is where you need to become a little creative and where you must use every medium at your disposal to get them to become aware of you and your value proposition.

Action Idea: Use Social Media

Social media is a really powerful way of connecting with qualified prospects. The secret to make this work for you is to never to try to sell them anything via social media. As soon as you try to introduce your product or service on any social media platform, people will just block you or ignore you flat. Social media is about giving and sharing, so to use this medium effectively, first just connect with the person via Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. 

Once they have accepted your connection request, research them and find ways of sharing and giving them content, which is aligned with their hobbies, interests or anything else, which will allow you to build connection with them. As they get to know you and see that you are a trusted connection, ask them what they do for a living. People love to speak about themselves and so they will share some very valuable information with you, information, which will serve you later, as you build the relationship. 

All people are curious and after they have described what they do and who they are, they will ask you a similar question in return. When they ask you the question about what you do, this is not the time to jump in with both feet and try to sell to them. Gently introduce yourself and remain a little mysterious, yet offer them sufficient information to make them curious. Once they start to ask more direct questions about what you do and offer, then you can ask for a meeting or a telephone conversation. By this stage they already know you, they have small trust in you and they are interested in what you have to do. You have effectively moved them to the third stage towards choosing your product or service, namely they interested in you have shown an interest in what you do.

How to do it

I carefully target and select my prospects based on my value proposition and their needs. Once I find a perfect fit for what I offer, I then identify the decision makers within the organisation and I try to make contact with them. If I am unsuccessful in arranging a meeting, I then find other innovative ways to connect with them via social media. My first port of call is LinkedIn, as this is more accepted as a medium for making business connections. I then research the prospect, using Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other media, if I am unsuccessful at finding the information I need via these media. It is seldom necessary to look much further than these forms of media as in 95 % of the cases these media are sufficient and you can gather all the information you need. 

I then either start to build the connection by regularly commenting on their posts, or sending them information related to their hobbies or other interests. This is a gradual process and does not happen in a day. It is only effective if you are consistent and persistent. I have set up my CRM system with reminders to help me stay focused and on track with this process. You need to have a number of prospects at various stages along the process. As you close one prospect; you need to refill the pipeline, by adding a new prospect, which you have carefully selected and targeted.

Evaluation and Trial

Once you have moved your prospect from awareness to interest, the next phase is evaluation. This is the time you need to remove all risk from the mind of your prospect. You obviously believe in your product or service and you have researched and qualified your prospect properly, so offering them a 100 % money back guarantee, carries no or very little risk at all. It does however show your prospect that you believe in what you offer so much that you are willing to give it to them for free, if it does not do what you say it will do. This removes the risk from the prospects mind and gets them to trust you and what you have to offer. 

After testing your product or putting it on trial, they will realise the wonderful value you bring and will buy from you with confidence. You can only follow this process if you believe in what you offer and if you trust what you sell. Believing in what you sell is fundamental to becoming successful in sales, so if you would not buy what you sell for the price you are selling it, you will obviously never succeed in sales.

Author: Andrew Horton Sales Training

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Are you Investing Enough Time into Developing your...

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Are you Investing Enough Time into Developing your...: Your mind or should I rather say the captain, who guides you on your journey through life and the thing, which is the sourc...

Are you Investing Enough Time into Developing your Mind?

Your mind or should I rather say the captain, who guides you on your journey through life and the thing, which is the source of who you are, is one of the most misunderstood and underutilised tools available in our success toolkit. The more you take care of it and work to consistently add new useful information and skills to your mind, the better equipped you will be to invite success into your life. Your mind is your reservoir, which holds all your potential. All you need to do, to create the exact life you want to lead, is discover how to unlock its unlimited capabilities and then to invest sufficient time and energy into helping it grow and to ensure that you keep it healthy. Invest Time and Energy into Developing your mind The time you invest into developing your mental muscle and growing your knowledge and abilities, will empower you to accomplish almost anything you want in life. Like any worthwhile endeavour, it is going to require some discipline and effort to continually invest into developing your mental muscle, but the investment will most certainly be worthwhile.  Developing your mind is a little like building muscle. You can’t just show up at the gym, once in a while, without a clue about what you need to do at the gym. If you are to build muscle, you need to design a program and workout schedule, which you use daily to guide your training at the gym daily. The same Is true for developing your mental muscle. You need a plan and a daily commitment to apply your plan, so that you can gradually develop your mind, into the incredible machine, which will support your success.  Become your own Mental Manager Stand guard at the door of your mind and don’t allow negative information to pass through into your mind. Avoid reading newspapers or listening to the news on the radio or TV. As you know all these media, love sensationalism and prefer telling negative stories. As most editors or producers say “If it Bleeds, it leads”. Wow how much more negative can you get than that?  When you read, ensure that you are reading worthwhile, books, which add real value to your life. Books, which educate, inspire and introduce positivity into your experience. When commuting in your car, listen to educational, inspirational or transformational CD’s. This will turn your car into your mobile university. If you must watch TV. Try to only watch educational or positive and uplifting programs.  Form Master Mind Groups Explore your world and find people or a group of people, who have the same desire, drive and passion as your own. Invest time with these people to share ideas, support each other and bask in the positivity, which flows from them. Great success is created when you surround yourself with other great minds, who support and uplift each other. Mentors Discover what you want to achieve and then find someone, who has travelled a similar path to the one you want to travel and find an innovative way to get them to mentor you. The way to get the most from any mentor is to discover a way to ensure that there is always fair exchange, where both parties get something from the relationship. Open your mind and be willing to learn all you can from you mentor; they truly are an incredible source of support, valuable information and knowledge. Your mind is all you have, so invest wisely into growing and expanding it. The more dedicated you are to continually grow your mind, the greater will be your success in the long-run. You most certainly will attract success, by the person you become. As you become more, you will definitely attract more and more and more. Come on dare to get off your butt and finally create that someone, you can be proud of. Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Motivational Speakers - Now we have started the be...

Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers: Motivational Speakers - Now we have started the be...: I have studied a number of very successful people around the world and based on my research I have discovered an effective formula for invi...

Motivational Speakers - Now we have started the believing – It is time to start the achieving

I have studied a number of very successful people around the world and based on my research I have discovered an effective formula for inviting similar levels of success into your own life. The first thing which stood out for me amongst the super achievers I studied was their 100 % acceptance, of the fact that, if they were to be successful it was completely up to them.

They then turned this acceptance of full responsibility into commitment, drive and passion, where they believed completely in their ability to achieve the outcome they wanted to achieve in their future. This belief then drove their expectations, which in turn created their crystal clear vision for the future. Their vision was then converted into a plan or a set of goals and action plans, which they acted on daily with patience and persistence.

I have described the process in more detail below. If you follow this formula and apply the ideas presented in your life, I am certain that you can achieve anything you desire.

Getting Started

Success is an Inside Job

Firstly remember that anything you pursue will always elude you. So remove the thought of pursuing success from your mind altogether. The way to invite any level of SUCCESS into your experience is by accepting that “If it is to be then, it is up to me” and adopting this as your new adage. Secondly you must decide what success actually means to you and why achieving it is important to you. Once you have clarified these in your mind, you will be certain that what you are trying to achieve is actually aligned with what you really want and you will have the resilience and drive to overcome the inevitable obstacles, which will be placed in your path.

Take Responsibility and you will Succeed

As I said before adapt the adage of “If it is to be, it is up to me”. Accept 100 % responsibility for everything in your life and commit to take inspired goal specific action daily and nothing will be able to stop you from achieving what you desire.

Finally, always remember that no one else’s expectations or opinions really matter; even the people who you trust to offer you reliable feedback, are ultimately only giving you their opinion. How you choose to use the information is always up to you. Learn to trust and believe in yourself and always allow your opinion to take precedence over anyone else’s and success is inevitable.

What Does Success Mean to you?

The way to achieve the level of satisfaction and fulfilment you desire is unique to you. So the best way to begin this journey, toward living the ultimate expression of your life, is to first define what “Living a Great Life” means to you specifically and then go about the business of making, just that possible for you.

Action Idea: Explore all the areas of your life and examine each one individually, then build a crystal clear picture in your mind, around exactly what you need to achieve in each to ensure that you are living a harmonious, life, filled with meaning.

Know why you want to Succeed

Discover your deep rooted reason why you want to succeed and nothing can or will stop you from succeeding.

If I placed a plank on the ground, which was about 30 cm wide and I offered you      R 1000 if you would walk over the plank. I am certain that you would jump at the opportunity to take my money, away from me so easily. If I however suspended the same plank between two high-rise buildings and now offered you the same prize to walk over the plank, I am certain that most people would see the increased risk of injury and would refuse to go anywhere near the plank.

Based on the changed circumstances, could you think of any reason why you would even consider walking over the plank? What if I said that your child was on the other building and that building was on fire? The flames were licking at the feet of your child. Would you now not run over the plank, not once, but twice to rescue your child?

What changed?

All that changed was your reason why you needed to cross the plank. The same is true about your dreams. Once you have discovered that deep rooted reason why you want to succeed, nothing can or will stop you.

Why is your Vision and Goals Important to you?

When you have discovered your burning child on the building or rather when you have discovered why achieving your goal is really important to you, no obstacles, roadblocks or challenges will ever be able to stop you. You will consistently keep taking inspired goal specific action daily and the momentum of these consistent actions will grow. Your awareness of why achieving any desired outcome is the catalyst, which will drive you to keep following through until you succeed and this  understanding and belief will ensure that nothing can or will stop you from succeeding.

Your Reason Why, Will Drive You to Succeed

My experience has shown me that, the success of your efforts does not depend on the efforts themselves, but rather on your motive for carrying out the actions in the first place. Super achievement, where individuals have excelled or where they have built great personal or business success, has in most cases, been driven by an unfathomable desire to express themselves, by solving a problem using their skills and knowledge as best they could. They felt compelled and driven to express their inner vision and nothing could stop them. Discover that deep rooted reason why you want to succeed at anything, take action daily and no obstacle or challenge will ever stop you from realising your dreams.

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers