Get Your Prospect’s Permission to Persist for Success in Sales
By Bigg Success Staff
04-02-08
Career Builders
Being persistent is good. Making a pest of yourself is bad. But how do you know when you’ve crossed the line?
Get your prospect’s permission to contact them again!
Take a hint from internet marketers – they get permission to send e-mails to their prospects. It’s called permission marketing. You’ll practice permission selling!
If they ask you to contact them, you’re not being a pest by doing so, are you? So getting permission is the key.
It’s easily done in two-steps:
1. Ask them when you should check back.
2. Then do it!
Most sales people do great with Step 1. Many fail miserably on Step 2.
In order to execute Step 2, you need a system that alerts you that it’s time to follow-up.
You may use advanced contact management software or simple index cards.
It doesn’t matter as long as it works!
As long as you follow-up when your prospect asked you to do so, you’ll have a leg up on many, if not most, of your competitors.
It sounds so simple, but apparently it’s not. Because if it was, more people would do it! So it’s not easy, but it is effective.
3 reasons why follow-up is so important
#1 – Test
Your prospect may be testing you. After all, if you don’t follow through as requested before you make a sale, how can you be expected to perform after a sale has been made?
#2 – Sales cycle
The length of your sales cycle depends on your product or service. However, many items require multiple calls to even give a proposal, let alone make a sale.
If you stop following up, on average, before you’ve reached the number of calls it takes to sell a typical prospect, you won’t succeed in sales. You have to persist, persist, persist.
But keep this in mind …
#3 – Busy, busy, busy
Your prospects are as busy as you are. Perhaps even more so. Your conversation may hold a higher priority in your mind than your prospect’s at that point in time.
That has nothing to do with you, your company, or what you sell. So you need to contact your prospect on the date they requested until they buy from you. After all, they’ve given permission to do just that!
Find out when we post new articles. Subscribe to the Bigg Success Weekly.
Hear today's lesson and laugh on The Bigg Success Show.
Related posts
254]
61]
163]
(Image by tatlici)
