Sales Prospecting by Positioning Your Business Where Customers Seek You Out "What business are you in?" It sounds a bit strange at first but it has massive implications to your business. Many businesses and salespeople lose sight of the real reason they are in business, that is to solve problems or help achieve goals. My company is not a sales training company, for example. I help people solve the problems of not attracting enough clients, and not utilising the ones they have to maximum impact and profitability. I use training, consulting, coaching, on line education, workshops and seminars to achieve this goal. I focus my business in finding people with those problems or goals. I am confident in the knowledge that this is what my business helps people to do. Even though I understand what my business is about solving these problems I have consciously set about making sure that people who are seeking me can find me easily. And you should do to. A personal Example: A few short years back, I moved across the country when I got married. I had a business where I consulted with companies about increasing their sales. I did this through a mixture of consultancy and sales training but the company was perceived as a consultancy company or a business coaching company - because that was how I had positioned it. The challenge I had was the Small and Medium size business community were not actively seeking sales consultants like me so there was a period of educating the marketplace. This education process took time and money that I would rather not have spent. Do you have a situation similar in your business? When I moved I had a chance to rethink my business strategy and spend some time doing some research on the marketplace. I was also lucky because my awareness of new technology had increased and I discovered little known ways of researching the viability of marketplaces. One of those I will gladly share with you now - its called Google Keyword research tool: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal This is by far one of the most powerful tools available to find out what the marketplace is searching for. It is real time and comes straight from the depths of Google - the No1 search engine in the world. When I was relocating I thought I could realistically position my new business as 1 of 3 different 'classifications' of business: · Business coaching (although I only cover the sales element) · Sales Coaching · Sales Training With that information in my mind I set about researching the marketplace. The results from Google UK, show there are about 18,000 searches per month for business coaching The results from Google UK, show there are about 12,000 searches per month for sales coaching and 1,000 for sales coach. The results from Google UK, show there are about 40,000 searches per month for sales training and about 4,000 monthly searches for telesales training. This gave me valuable insights into the marketplace and told me that there were at least twice as many people actively searching for sales training than any other related search. The choice therefore, was a no-brainer. The company was positioned around a sales training company. In truth, I still provide the same consultancy service to many of my clients after we meet. The difference being, however, is most of my clients that find me through the Internet do so by first searching for sales training. They are actively seeking me out and that is a fantastic position to be in, in business. What terms do people use to find the problems you solve and the solutions you offer?
We now invite you to find out hundreds more sales prospecting strategies at Sales Blog and Presentation Training