Prospecting for mineral ore deposits is hard work. Prospectors travel on foot or horseback in desolate locations and under harsh conditions. Traversing stream beds and outcrops, they pan and sift looking for indications of viable deposits.
It’s physically demanding to comb the countryside, searching for exposed material in creek beds, rock outcrops, and ridge lines. Once prospectors find an occurrence of the ore, then they work that area to evaluate its viability using pick and shovel or a simple machine like a sluice box. Often these occurrences are short-lived and produce little of value, forcing the prospector to keep looking.
Selling as a production activity is more like this prospector than manufacturing. Unlike Manufacturing, which can order high quality raw materials from a catalog, Marketing and Sales has little control over its raw material. Before it can create a customer, it must find the raw material of potential buyers.
- Sales people often are expected to find and qualify potential customers on their own.
- Each sales person has a method, but little sharing of best practices goes on.
- In some shops sales people actually compete with each other, further diminishing the possibility of sharing successful prospecting methods.
- Shops have little common definition of what constitutes a lead or a qualified prospect, so sales people often spend time on prospective buyers that will go nowhere
- Marketing conducts activities that create broad awareness about the company and its products. But their efforts often deliver too little information about where sales people should put their energy (too few leads). Or they deliver information about too many places to look (too many poor leads), most of which are not good material.
The mining industry of course no longer relies on the lone prospector with his pickax and sluice box. The industry has developed engineering techniques to gain more control over the process of looking for raw material.
Similarly, Marketing can be more systematic about how it finds the raw material of potential buyers that it can deliver to Sales.
Mary and Michael Molloy suggest this method for getting started:
- Establish your goals: Define what products you are selling, who you are selling it to, where they are located, the industries they work in, and the channels of distribution you’ll use. By defining more precisely your ultimate target, you’ll be able to focus your efforts more effectively.
- Profile your target customer audience: Now that you have a definition of success, it’s time to profile your ideal prospect. Before you can search for raw material, you have to know what your buyers look like. Who are they? What’s important to them? And, most important, what problem would your ideal prospect have that you are the best company to fix? Your market is composed of businesses who suffer most from this problem and who are the most prepared to pay money to have it fixed.
You’ll never be able to order prospects from a catalog the way Manufacturing orders its raw material. But with a more systematic approach you’ll gain control and predictability over the first stage of customer creation, finding high quality potential buyers.
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