We're all in sales now!

We’re all in sales now!

How developing the mindset of a salesman can help a business thrive.

Cockney barrow boy: Alan Sugar is proud of his
roots selling fruit and veg from a barrow.

When I was selling medical insurance to corporates and the self-employed - and before that in sales recruitment - during the early days the phone would never ring with a hot prospect just falling into my lap – I would have considered that manna from Heaven!  I had to go hunting for business.  If someone did ring up ‘out of the blue’, then you can guarantee that I was straight onto it and either a meeting was booked without delay or the information was provided post haste and follow-up calls arranged.

In the competitive worlds of insurance and recruitment, you can’t afford to leave a prospect un-responded, even if it means you are working on your weekend or your holiday, because they will simply go elsewhere. For a salesman, someone who contacts you is a prospect who probably has a desire and interest in making that purchase now – they are certainly someone keen to know more about your product or service and that makes them part-qualified! You don’t delay and you call them straight back, even if it turns out to be fruitless, but you always know that a hot prospect can turn cold very quickly and that you only have a very short window of opportunity in which to respond.

With this in mind, I recently needed some painting done to our house, in preparation for renting out the property.  I usually ring about five professionals, so that I have a choice and also to ensure that if someone doesn’t get back to me, for whatever reason, then I am not left without any options. All of them went straight to an answerphone or voicemail. The painting job was going to be a few days of work and covered much of the interior of the house – it was a good job for someone. Of the five that I called, I received no response, even though I left a message explaining what I was after and also gave them the opportunity of calling or emailing me – but no one returned my call. I even took to Twitter and got various retweets and some recommendations, but again, no one contacted me directly. Eventually, my lettings agent managed to fix me up with a tenant who was also a painter and decorator and he went straight round and did a first class job.

I am not picking on the building trade, because there are plenty of instances in other industries where a similar thing happens, but I am left scratching my head as to why and I am perplexed how any business owner is prepared to ignore potential trade.  Many of those businesses were small or even sole traders, but most had been located from a weekly local advertising magazine that would have cost them money in which to place a regular advert – clearly their advertising was working, because they had a hot prospect calling them directly, but why weren't they responding?

Partly it is symptomatic of some industries, when the business owner has a pipeline of business for the next few weeks, they are then reluctant to take on any further work, because their current resources and manpower are stretched. I understand that. However, not only am I now a lost customer for that piece of work, I am now a lost customer for any future work and any potential referrals that might arise. ‘Walk ins’, as they call them in retail, are worth their weight in gold, precisely because they have come looking for you, rather than you having to go hunting for them.  When times are good, you may feel that you can turn business away, but if a slump in trade is around the corner, then you need all the goodwill that you can muster.

The point of this post is a simple one: even if you are a sole trader without a sales team to back you up, make sure that you follow up and acknowledge potential leads and particularly those that come looking for you because of your marketing efforts or a recommendation.  Unless you speak with them, you may not find out why they are contacting you and the nature of what they want.  As it happened, I could have waited a few weeks, but none of those painters found that out, because none of them bothered to contact me and ask.  Maybe you could give a recommendation to a competitor, who may then return the favour in a period when they are too busy to accept a job. Maybe it’s a prospect that offers you some regular work and sees you through the next recession. You may not see yourself as being in sales, but developing a bit of the mind-set of a salesman and ensuring that you follow up on every lead, might just mean the difference between a business that grows and thrives and one that just becomes another statistic of business failure.

Oh … and it might just mean that I get my house painted too.

Written by Will Trevor, Founder and Training Consultant at Windsor Training
Email: will.trevor@windsortraining.net

Picture Credit: Damien Everett [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons