Prospecting - The Lifeblood of Selling
Qualifying leads and prospects is an important first step for anyone’s sales process. To be effective in selling one must have a good start and become as productive as possible in identifying qualified leads. Qualifying leads and prospects plays a very significant role in selling. Without a solid prospect list, it will be difficult to build a sales territory. Finding the potential prospects is one of the most critical phases of a salesperson’s work. If a salesperson is not vigilant, he will lose the potential customers to aggressive competitors. Sales prospecting have been compared to panning for gold. Just as a prospector digs for the gold, using his pick and pan, the sales prospector must also look for qualified prospects using his sales tools.
In the case we can see Larry, John and Kathryn taking about different methods for prospecting. Larry is talking about advertisement and then about providing company’s service to generate the lead which will give valuable information about product and their companies where as John is talking about referral sale given by existing customer. He knows the value of a prospect that has been referred by an existing client happy with their product or service. This prospect is easier to sell than a new lead who knows very little about the company. Qualifying this prospect can be much easier than a lead obtained through other means. John is also talking about attacking on competitors by taking their customer. Kathryn is talking about trade directory and cold calling. She thinks telephone is the greatest sales tool ever invented. It enables salespeople to prospect not only in their own town but around the world as well.
Each of them has their own thought about prospecting the product. But for the product like computer cannot depend on one source of prospecting. In this case we cannot say that Larry’s idea is best or John’s idea is best or Kathryn’s because to generate the prospect for product like computer there has to be mix of each provided by Larry, John, and Kathryn.
What Prospecting system would you recommend? Why?
If I have to do selling for Apple Macintosh and generate lead then I will use mix of all the sources of Prospecting. In every marketplace there are sales nuggets to discover. Effective prospecting system is a critical component of sustainable sales success. Finding the right prospects is the key to successful selling.
As the salespeople’s immediate supervisor, it is the primary responsibility of the manager to provide proper training to enhance the salespersons’ effectiveness and improve their skills. Given the importance of having a productive and enthusiastic sales team, the manager needs to develop and manage effective reward and compensation packages to ensure a highly motivated and satisfied sales force. Sales managers also ensure that the company 's standards of professionalism, image, and branding are consistent with the sales team’s interaction with company customers. The manager 's presence also makes customers feel valued as well as provide credibility on behalf of the company (Pilling, Donthu, & Henson,
Companies realize what people need and they take it as sources to produce commodities. However, companies which have famous brands try to get people’s attention by developing their products. Because there are several options available of commodities, people might be in a dilemma to choose what product they looking for. In fact, that dilemma is not real, it is just what people want. That is what Steve McKevitt claims in his article “Everything Now”.
Precise and comprehensive information is the basis of all successful commerce activity because it provides a vast amount of information about possible customers, existing ones and the firm’s competition. Market research allows business proprietors to establish the viability of a business venture before committing sizeable resources.
This situation seemed interesting to Vanguard because of the exponential increase in the number of potential clients, whom Vanguard doesn’t have to directly advise and serve about their products and services, combined with the high potential for profitability. The development of this broad qualified sales force could also be done at relatively low development cost. The positive aspects of this alternative are somehow strongly counterbalanced by the fact that huge efforts of mass advertising would be required in order to inform the potential customers about Vanguard’s brand, and over whom Vanguard would have no control in the sale process. Vanguard would also have to face some strong competition in its relationship with the intermediaries, who are not always the most loyal sales representatives.
The sales leads are now centralized and accessible across branches rather than individually gathered and processed by salespeople. In standardizing customer information, it now makes the marketing teams, analytic teams, and customer managers on the same page. It creates a “friendly competition” that encourages close cooperation for all areas. One major cost that this new strategy created was the confusion of different areas in RBC. Product managers and customer managers often misunderstood what way of action was appropriate, which lead to another problem: it took more time to make decisions. A benefit of this change is that there was no fighting for resources and instead cooperation. Another benefit would be the divisional organization, which can be seen in Exhibits 3a and
There are a range of segmentations that allows a company to target potential customers effectively.
Also, this led to augmentation of the product design with information obtained by the market team. By attracting two paying development partners, TallyUp and Onset outperformed their efforts in a step enabling them to try their product and fine tune it. However, their decision to hire a CEO was a little early since their business model had not yet settled. Moreover, their product was not yet introduced in the market and not yet fully developed.
The success of these products against each other has to be predicted using the newspaper articles provided. The demand and sales estimates of these products along with the customer perception of the product needs to be projected and ranked between each product.
Sales agents, for example, are often more willing to prospect customers. They are more persistent and more inclined to offer a trial close to a negotiation than are company sales people.
...f five people to generated new product ideas, among other tasks. One of their roles is to assist business units within 3M to generate new product ideas. They accomplish this by drawing up a plan to create ideas for products that will be marketable ten years in future. Once they have that plan in mind, they backtrack to the present year with new product ideas that are possible with today's technology. They then predict which additional products will be added year by year that will build upon each year's new technological advances to achieve their tenth year vision.
There are three strategies that are generally used for identifying the most profitable target markets and they are as follows
Make the decision through the integration of ideas and data, and negotiation and prioritization of ideas
IDEO should not accept the Visor project, exepet if the other company change the deadline is one of largest and most efficient firm for product designing worldwide. The major customers of IDEO include 3Com for which IDEO develops Palm V-held computer. As the Palm V is getting the huge market success this has initiated a competition in the industry of hand-held computers. The major competitors of this industry are HandSpring and 3Com. Both are approach to IDEO for design the new competitive VISOR product. HandSpring management has now demanded IDEO to design and manufacture the prototype of VISOR in less than half the time it took to design the Palm V. Now IDEO is in a scenario that it has to make a decision that whether it should develop the product or not. Or IDEO should propose HandSpring to increase the development period as otherwise in such period of time they have to compromise their innovation and design in order to meet the deadline.
A sales manager has many responsibilities such as spreading product to customers, setting sales areas, goals, and analyzing sales data (“Sales Manager” What’s para. 1). Although a sales manager performs many duties, people in this position will also set a sales goal for the year, and will build a sales outlook on what they will do in the upcoming years (“Sales Manager” Sokanu para. 1).A person in this position will also manage where the goods and products their company will be distributing by giving certain sales area where a salesman will work and sell the product (“Sales Manager” Sokanu para. 2). During work time, a sales manager may be asked to hire and train a new salesman added to his team (“Sales Manager” Sokanu para. 3). Occasionally, a sales manager will interpret sales statistics in a specific area when looking where to assign certain salesman to a sales territory (“Sales Manager” Sokanu pa...
...cular market. Companies that conduct market research normally save a lot of money by understanding what type of product or service is needed, other than entering the market blindly without knowing what to expect.