Sales Leads: Where to find them and how to get them!
Sales Leads are easier to get than you ever imagined,
Every sales job I ever had required some kind of prospecting. Even the companies that provided leads will required that you to actually canvass the leads they provide. You will do this either on the phone or in person to qualify and separate the grain from the chaff so to speak.
Some of the companies I worked for made big glowing promises during the hiring seminar about how great the leads were and the fact is that if you went to work for them, cold calling and door knocking would be a thing of the past. Yeah, right!
Honestly the bigger and more outlandish the pitch the worse the leads would be. I remember the first sales company I worked for told me and all of the other prospective sales employees how great their leads and prospects were. If you believed what they were saying literally you would think every name they handed to you was a lay down mooch.
Sadly this was not the case. Instead when I went to work for them the first morning on the job they gave each of us new salespeople a handful of neatly typed three by five inch pieces of paper. Not even three by five cards, mind you but three by five inch paper slips. They had the name, address and phone number of the prospect with enough space at the bottom to put notes of what happen on the call.
This system was a cheap way of doing business but it turned out to be a very efficient way of doing business at the time.
You would call these people on the phone and about one out of three would answer. Then about one out of ten contacts on average would make an appointment.
Once you learned how to really close your sales you would find that about one of three of the appointments would miraculously turn in to a sale.
So that was when I heard the word lead mentioned I knew it was simply a name and address of someone who might have an interest in what I was selling. This was good training because I had learned one of the greatest secrets in the Sales business. I learned how to turn names and addresses into money.
Back in those days we made roughly one hundred and ten dollars on the average sale so working backwards, 3 appointments times ten phone presentations was 30 and then considering only one out of three was home when you dialed the number meant 90 phone calls actually would net you about one hundred and ten dollars or roughly one dollar and twenty two cents a dial whether anyone answered the phone or not.
This was heck of a deal in 1962 when most of my friends were making 35 or 40 dollars per week at dead end jobs. Even the high dollar employees working at executive positions in banks and large businesses were only making around 10,000.00 a year at the most. I knew this for sure because I was filling out credit applications on most of them.
Just imagine, here I am wearing new suits, driving nice cars and eating out three meals a day and I still have money in my pocket.
My sole source of income is from the phone book.
None of my friends could figure out what I was doing. Once I really learned the job I was sleeping to the crack of noon and going out every night and doing what most young men my age liked to do in the evening.
Truthfully money was not always plentiful but most of the time it was. If I was really broke I could always go write a deal and get an advance and I was in high cotton once again.
Leads are the life blood of the salesperson’s business but they are not what most new salespeople are thinking they are.
Unfortunately, most salespeople think leads are sales. They are looking for the easy way out. When people mail in a card they are usually writing in for free information or some cheap but perhaps useful gift. If the prospects were a hundred percent sure they wanted the product they would have already gone online and bought it.
It is the salesperson’s job to convert the leads they get into paying business. It is not as hard as it sounds but honestly it does take a good dose of common sense to get this job done.
You have to learn to take this little spark of interest on the prospects part and fan it into enough real interest to make a sale.
Leads are in the masses of people you see at super markets, fairs, home shows, walking down the street. They are every where if you have the determination and confidence to approach and covert them into sales.
My biggest and best deals were always where I would least to expect them. When you get good at prospecting I could take you up in an airplane and let you sky dive into a totally unknown territory with a sales kit and you would have a sale or two before the evening was over.
It is just a matter of learning to qualify and turn a reasonable amount of your suspects into prospects that you can sell.
How do you do this you may ask? The answer is by using your head. You see this entire sales business is just a mind game.
For example if you sell roofing and siding. You could walk or drive down the street looking for homes that have a need for a new roof or the paint is peeling off of the house. Believe me there are a lot of houses in this condition.
The home owners know they need to get the work done but they just keep procrastinating and putting it off until someone like your self walks up and asks them about it.
Once you find out they either have the money to do the job or have good enough credit to have it financed you can proceed to make the sale.
If you treat people right and don’t take advantage of them, guess what, they will buy from you and be glad that they did. If you offer one of the best deals in town (more for the money) you can sell a lot of business, make a lot of money and sleep well at night to.
You will find a lot of these well satisfied customers will recommend you to their friends and relatives and guess what, with one door knock or two and may be a phone call you have sold two, three may be even four jobs.
I know because, I have done it and seen it done numerous times.
So once again it is just a mind game, sell you’re self first and then you can sell the public because it turns out a lead is just simply a name and an address.
You are the one that makes it happen.
One good point to remember when the interviewer tells how great the leads are, you can get really excited now because you know you will be able to make a living with this company after all.
You will also be leaving all of the other new hires behind who are still using the crying towel, thinking that leads are sales when they are not.
Once you convince your self you can do it and develop the confidence to go and actually do it, you will get the job done.
Thank you,
Billy J. Gibson
Thesellingfoolbjg@yahoo.com
http://www.thesellingfool.com/
Every sales job I ever had required some kind of prospecting. Even the companies that provided leads will required that you to actually canvass the leads they provide. You will do this either on the phone or in person to qualify and separate the grain from the chaff so to speak.
Some of the companies I worked for made big glowing promises during the hiring seminar about how great the leads were and the fact is that if you went to work for them, cold calling and door knocking would be a thing of the past. Yeah, right!
Honestly the bigger and more outlandish the pitch the worse the leads would be. I remember the first sales company I worked for told me and all of the other prospective sales employees how great their leads and prospects were. If you believed what they were saying literally you would think every name they handed to you was a lay down mooch.
Sadly this was not the case. Instead when I went to work for them the first morning on the job they gave each of us new salespeople a handful of neatly typed three by five inch pieces of paper. Not even three by five cards, mind you but three by five inch paper slips. They had the name, address and phone number of the prospect with enough space at the bottom to put notes of what happen on the call.
This system was a cheap way of doing business but it turned out to be a very efficient way of doing business at the time.
You would call these people on the phone and about one out of three would answer. Then about one out of ten contacts on average would make an appointment.
Once you learned how to really close your sales you would find that about one of three of the appointments would miraculously turn in to a sale.
So that was when I heard the word lead mentioned I knew it was simply a name and address of someone who might have an interest in what I was selling. This was good training because I had learned one of the greatest secrets in the Sales business. I learned how to turn names and addresses into money.
Back in those days we made roughly one hundred and ten dollars on the average sale so working backwards, 3 appointments times ten phone presentations was 30 and then considering only one out of three was home when you dialed the number meant 90 phone calls actually would net you about one hundred and ten dollars or roughly one dollar and twenty two cents a dial whether anyone answered the phone or not.
This was heck of a deal in 1962 when most of my friends were making 35 or 40 dollars per week at dead end jobs. Even the high dollar employees working at executive positions in banks and large businesses were only making around 10,000.00 a year at the most. I knew this for sure because I was filling out credit applications on most of them.
Just imagine, here I am wearing new suits, driving nice cars and eating out three meals a day and I still have money in my pocket.
My sole source of income is from the phone book.
None of my friends could figure out what I was doing. Once I really learned the job I was sleeping to the crack of noon and going out every night and doing what most young men my age liked to do in the evening.
Truthfully money was not always plentiful but most of the time it was. If I was really broke I could always go write a deal and get an advance and I was in high cotton once again.
Leads are the life blood of the salesperson’s business but they are not what most new salespeople are thinking they are.
Unfortunately, most salespeople think leads are sales. They are looking for the easy way out. When people mail in a card they are usually writing in for free information or some cheap but perhaps useful gift. If the prospects were a hundred percent sure they wanted the product they would have already gone online and bought it.
It is the salesperson’s job to convert the leads they get into paying business. It is not as hard as it sounds but honestly it does take a good dose of common sense to get this job done.
You have to learn to take this little spark of interest on the prospects part and fan it into enough real interest to make a sale.
Leads are in the masses of people you see at super markets, fairs, home shows, walking down the street. They are every where if you have the determination and confidence to approach and covert them into sales.
My biggest and best deals were always where I would least to expect them. When you get good at prospecting I could take you up in an airplane and let you sky dive into a totally unknown territory with a sales kit and you would have a sale or two before the evening was over.
It is just a matter of learning to qualify and turn a reasonable amount of your suspects into prospects that you can sell.
How do you do this you may ask? The answer is by using your head. You see this entire sales business is just a mind game.
For example if you sell roofing and siding. You could walk or drive down the street looking for homes that have a need for a new roof or the paint is peeling off of the house. Believe me there are a lot of houses in this condition.
The home owners know they need to get the work done but they just keep procrastinating and putting it off until someone like your self walks up and asks them about it.
Once you find out they either have the money to do the job or have good enough credit to have it financed you can proceed to make the sale.
If you treat people right and don’t take advantage of them, guess what, they will buy from you and be glad that they did. If you offer one of the best deals in town (more for the money) you can sell a lot of business, make a lot of money and sleep well at night to.
You will find a lot of these well satisfied customers will recommend you to their friends and relatives and guess what, with one door knock or two and may be a phone call you have sold two, three may be even four jobs.
I know because, I have done it and seen it done numerous times.
So once again it is just a mind game, sell you’re self first and then you can sell the public because it turns out a lead is just simply a name and an address.
You are the one that makes it happen.
One good point to remember when the interviewer tells how great the leads are, you can get really excited now because you know you will be able to make a living with this company after all.
You will also be leaving all of the other new hires behind who are still using the crying towel, thinking that leads are sales when they are not.
Once you convince your self you can do it and develop the confidence to go and actually do it, you will get the job done.
Thank you,
Billy J. Gibson
Thesellingfoolbjg@yahoo.com
http://www.thesellingfool.com/
posted by thesellingfool | 3:42 PM
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