OK, so I’m gonna show you something that will allow you to discover more prospects than you just might ever need.
First I want to be clear on a few things because people get confused about this all the time and it messes them up in their head.
In the sales process the natural way things go is like this. You prospect, you find prospects, you contact prospects, prospect turns into lead, you market to leads and lead turns into sale.
Many people mistake prospects for leads and that is not the case. A prospect is someone you have never been in contact with, someone that has not expressed interest in your service/product/company, and you are not sure if they are. A lead is someone you have made a contact with, they are aware of who you are, and what you do, and have shown an interest in what you do.
Now some will disagree in what qualifies for a lead. And that is OK, the definition of “lead” can be subjective. Specifically some will disagree with the “have shown interest in what you do” part of my definition, but if you think about it, if they aren’t interested how can they be a lead?
Some poeple will say “Well they may not have shown interest but I think that this will be a perfect fit for them”. And that is fine…..if you like spending countless hours on followups and trying to convince them. Me personally, I prefer only to focus on people that have shown interest. They might not be ready to buy or join, and they may never take action, but it is still a more qualified lead than someone that has shown no interest right of the bat.
A lead in it’s very essence is something that LEADS you to believe that this person has an interest in what you are offering. If they don’t LEAD you to believe they are interested, then they are not a LEAD, in my opinion, they are either still a prospect or not worth pursuing altogether, or at least not viewed as a priority. If you watch any police stories you hear about the detectives that have a lead on a certain case they are investigating. They investigate (prospect) and from their investigation (prospecting) they come up with leads to help them solve the case.
Now this might sound obvious to some, and that is fine, you already get it, but others may have never looked at things this way, and now a light bulb is going off, because if you aren’t in the right mindset, and your head is thinking you are doing one thing when you are actually doing the other, your process and your actions will be all out of kilter and you will not get good results.
So make sure that when you are prospecting you understand that you are just looking for sources where you can find leads, those sources are not actual leads yet.
Now the reason I like this method is because it helps me to find the kind of prospects I am looking for. I want to find professionals that are already in some way related to or involved in what my business is all about. That is the only type of prospect I want to deal with. I don’t deal with talking to random people that aren’t already involved in the niche I am promoting. For instance, many of you are told to make a list of family and friends. Sure that may yield some results (which history has told us, the results will be tiny), but for the most part you are chasing people who A.) don’t understand anything about running a business, because they never have and B.) aren’t already passionate or involved in the niche you are promoting.
So if you are promoting vitamins what is the point of talking to your cousin who is an auto mechanic who has never run a business and has never done anything related to health and wellness. It just doesn’t make sense. Even if they did join the chances of them quitting are about 98%.
We want to come up with a laser targeted list of prospects to contact, that are already in the niche in some way, shape, or form, and try to turn them into leads.
So here is what you can do (I wanted to do a video about this but for some reason my screen capture software keeps crashing on me so I gotta get the bugs out of it, so you will just have to read along):
I want you to go to manta.com
Next Go to the search field
Now Manta is a business directory, but I am gonna show you how to use it to find prospects. Ready?? Yeah, yeah, I know, get to the point Brian.
OK for the purposes of this training we are going to use what is hot right now and what alot of people are promoting, especially for the fact that it is the end of the year and people are getting their New Years resolutions ready. So we are going to use weight loss, but you can type in what ever niche you are in (weight loss, skin care, vitamins, telecommunications, etc.).
**Pending on what your niche is the results will vary, I have plugged in all the above keywords and they all yielded decent numbers, but make sure you use variations of keywords such as, weight loss, weight management, diet, etc.
Ok so we plug in weight loss
And this is what we get
As you can see that key word comes up with over 14,000 companies that are already involved in the weight loss niche. They get it, they are already running a business related to what you do. And as you see by the second arrow you can drill down and search by location if you want to stay within your state or target a particular state if you so choose. But think about it. Think out of these 14,000 prospects you might be able to find a few leads? Yeah, I bet you could too.
But let’s take this a step further and find out the BIG reason why Manta is awesome.
So you need to look through the listings and find some that you want to have a look at. I would stick to privately owned companies, hospitals are not gonna do you any good, I didn’t look to see if Hospitals are listed but if they are they will be pretty useless.
So I clicked on the second result and I get this
HOW ‘BOUT THAT!! The owner of a weight loss companies’ address, phone, website (check out their website to see if they have a facebook icon and fan their page, **hint, hint), email, a way to email them through Manta, and the most powerful thing of all THE PROSPECTS NAME!!!!!
There is gold in ‘dem there hills!!!
OK, OK, seriously, think about it, here you have a person who is in the weight loss industry and they OWN a weight loss company. Think there might be a business owner or two who might be interested in adding additional streams of income into their already established business? Think they might know a few people that want to lose weight and might want to buy some weight loss products? I think they just might.
But, getting back to my earlier point, right now these are just prospects. You don’t know what they are all about, what they want or need, or what they are interested in, so you need to find out. Now this isn’t a post about generating leads so I’m not gonna get to deep into that. But this is what I do, and the reason I do things this way is because A.) I don’t want to seem like a pushy sales person B.) I don’t want to waste time (sales and prospecting is a numbers game for the most part, so I want to contact as many prospects as possible without wasting time so I can find out if they are gonna turn into leads or not) C.) I want a reason to call this person, so it just doesn’t seem like a cold call (if you are good at cold calling then go for it, I’m not very good at it right now, and am working on getting better at it).
What I like to do is send them something in the mail, either a sales letter that I wrote up, or I often grab large packs of greeting cards that you can get at CVS or a similar place (they usually come in packs of 25 or 50 and are short money) anyways I send out something and wait a few days. After a few days have past to ensure delivery, I will call the person and tell them that I sent them out some information and wondering if they got it. After that I try to open up dialogue and try to start to build a relationship with them. Find out what they are all about and try to find out if they might be interested in what I have and see if they turn into a lead. Again this is the simplified, version, we all know sometimes it takes more that this the first time.
I’m glazing over the initial contact part of the process I know, but that is a whole discussion in itself and there isn’t enough time to get to deep into it. I have put some resources below that will help you as far as things like cold calling, getting past gate keepers (if any), and writing sales letters. My main focus for this post was to give you a tool that will help you find prospects that can turn to leads and then to sales.
So put that into action, play with keywords and different geographical areas, and get to prospecting and finding gold. It’s out there you just gotta start kicking over some rocks.
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