"I need to learn some new prospecting strategies," Erin, an advisor from the Midwest, told me. "I've done okay, but what I'm doing doesn't seem to be getting me anywhere lately." I asked her to tell me about her practice.
"How many clients do you have now?"
"About 300. A few are what I would consider clients, but most are really just one-time 'customers.'"
"Then you don't really need to learn any new prospecting strategies at all," I said. "What you need to do is turn some of those 'customers' into 'clients' and some of those clients into fiercely loyal advocates."
Most sales-training programs are based on the theory that sales is a "numbers game" and nothing more. While the quantity of your contacts is important, their quality is equally—if not more—important.
If your job is really to find a lead, make a sale and then go looking for another lead to make another sale, you will easily become exhausted. You're starting at the beginning each time. Leveraging existing relationships is a more efficient and powerful way to grow any business. It involves these two aspects:
1. Finding more ways to serve existing clients, and
