Make Top-Down Support for a Stand-Alone Sales
Prospecting Cycle Your Priority

By Barry Lieberman
Advantage Plus Marketing Group

If you want to see good results from your Prospecting efforts, you'll need executive commitment from your senior executive team as well as from top-level managers in both Marketing and Sales. They must push their support for the process and a requirement to participate down through their organizations.

Everyone in Marketing, Sales, and Prospecting must commit to using the system consistently, working together to realize its success. Each must accept their individual responsibility to participate, making their unique contributions to the process. Most importantly, the entire process must be measured at every step.

Why? Because measurement allows accountability. The only way to achieve a truly integrated and automated Marketing and Sales system that includes prospect nurturing and follow-up is to establish an environment in which people are held accountable for the results they produce.

Accountability both top-down and bottom-up
It has been proven that high-quality prospects primed for the final sale will result when Prospecting is split from the sales rep's responsibility and handled by an organization devoted to its execution. But you can't achieve any degree of success until everyone – all of the sales managers, inside and out, the executives in every marketing & sales function, and the senior executive team – understand and endorse that prospect growth has it's own cycle and process.

All of these players must come to see it as a business process – one that is critical to your company's sales mission, and thus, its future. This is a key point because implementing a separate prospect development process requires a change in the way organizations – and the people who work for them – do things.

When everyone involved must account for their role in the success of marketing, prospecting & selling, it becomes easier to show a return-on-marketing investment.

Executive commitment is key – or it won't work
Changes in a company's culture have to be driven from the top down. Here, in a nutshell, are the four areas of commitment to Prospecting that everyone must get behind:

• A dedicated function. Sales reps don't develop "leads" to the point of sale – we already know that 75% of the time they don't follow up more than once or twice, anyway – and Prospectors don't write proposals, provide quotes, or close deals. Sales reps always have the option of kicking a contact back to the Prospecting group for further follow-up if a sale doesn't seem imminent. No one ever loses contact with a prospective customer, so it's a win/win for everyone. I explained this in greater detail in our last newsletter issue.

• Permanent budget. Prospecting requires resources independent of funds for marketing communications, sales, and even customer relations. Sustained commitment to an annual budget they can count on allows prospectors to work their programs of information-gathering and nurturing potential buyers consistently.

• Database tools. This is key. Prospecting, marketing and sales is a long customer touch process that requires a working a database management system. Everyone (marketing planners, sales reps and prospectors alike) have to use a linked database system so every step of the entire process can be tracked. The database will tell you from which marketing program – which print ad, online activity or tradeshow – a prospect originated, in what industry, and how many follow-ups were needed until that prospect was deemed ready to talk to a sales rep. You should be able to evaluate sales successes, and failures, from origination to completion. This tells you who, and what, works best.

• Accountability. Pre-agreed upon benchmarks for every phase of working a "prospect" that converts to sales revenue, enables managers to monitor everyone's contributions. We know from experience that the "carrot-and-stick" approach to managing people works very well, especially in a sales organization. Management must decree that everyone will use the system, and then provide the tools and rewards to make their compliance easy. This process can be painful if sales people who refuse to toe the line must be let go but their managers must have the courage to follow through.

Once you have these four elements of executive commitment working together, you have a foundation on which to build a successful Prospecting program with the ultimate goal of turning marketing effort into actual sales giving your senior executive team the ROI they want. Want to know more about our Prospecting Engine™, other direct marketing solutions and Advantage Plus Marketing Group? Call us at 800-432-9466 and/or visit our website at www.apmg.com.