Prospecting — Your Favorite Topic!

Of all the topics we cover and share in our training materials, the one that seems to cause the most consternation is prospecting. Who wants to call someone they don't know and try to sell them something they don't think they need? In our experience, advertisers rarely pick up the phone and call us because they need advertising. So, we write books, articles, do webinars and try to help sellers develop new business.

Always looking for new ideas, new strategies and new opportunities to make this stressful part of the sales process less stressful, we found an article from Tracy Baumann, writing for the Brooks Group. In her article, she shares The 5 Characteristics of a Qualified Prospect.

Awareness of Need — In order to be truly qualified, a prospect must have a need that they are aware of. In other words, they recognize they have a problem. Authority or Ability to Buy or Commit — Baumann suggests two questions early in the process to make this determination:

Who else, other than you of course, will be involved in the buying decision? Could you describe the process you will be using to make this decision?

Sense of Urgency — We don't have time to spend with prospects that aren't anxious to make a decision. If they have a clearly defined problem, you'll want to ask questions to determine what it's costing them not to solve it.

Trust in You and Your Organization — A potential client must trust you and your organization to be fully qualified.

Willingness to Listen — This should be the easiest to recognize, are they willing to listen to what you have to say?

As we dust off the winter blues and head into the summer season, we have the potential to impact our communities' economies by helping businesses grow. Finding new categories and new business opportunities is critical. Prospecting is where it all starts. It's the first step of our RAB 7-Steps to Selling Success.

At RAB, we have developed a tool called the Prospect Success Indicator. (PSI) It looks at many of the things that Baumann is suggesting, and one critical extra — The customer match to your station's audience. Our PSI is a simple spreadsheet where you fill out a couple of pieces of information and the spreadsheet calculates the value of the prospect on a scale of excellent to questionable. RAB members email me at Jeff.Shmidt@rab.com, and I'll be happy to send the tool.

You'll also find other tools and resources available to you as an RAB member highlighted in today's newsletter. Our mission is to support you. If you need anything, just ask RAB!

Happy Monday!

Jeff Schmidt is the SVP of Professional Development. You can reach him at Jeff.Schmidt@rab.com. You can all so connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.