Читать книгу Selling Security Systems Like a Pro - Lou Sepulveda - Страница 7

“Give a man a fish and he’ll have food for a day.

Teach a man to fish and he’ll have food for a lifetime.”

I know companies that have ruined their sales force by hand-feeding all leads to them while at the same time complaining that their salespeople have become lead junkies. If you continue giving a man fish, he has no need to learn how to catch fish. The same is true with leads. In a perfect sales world a company would generate enough company leads to reward salespeople for generating their own leads. A one-to-two ratio would be satisfactory. Here, the company provides one lead for every two leads the salesperson produces for himself.

You should invest time in training learning how to develop your own lead sources.

Developing methods to continually find prospects is of paramount importance. A company can start with a team of better-than-average salespeople, give them leads every day for a year or two, and before you know it they’ve created “lead junkies,” salespeople who no longer know how to fend for themselves, how to feed themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against giving salespeople help in the way of a lead. However, the leads the company provides should not be enough for them to feed their families on. The leads the company provides should be the bonus given for finding prospects on their own.

In top sales organizations, it is the sales manager’s job to teach the salespeople to prospect for leads. However, at the end of the day, your financial future is still in your hands. Every chance you get you should go to sales seminars, and buy books and CDs on the topic of lead generation. The fact is that you can’t sell unless you have someone to sell to.

The following paragraphs will cover numerous methods of finding people to sell to. However, let me give you a few words of caution first. First, no one method listed here will work by itself often enough to make a big difference. Second, there is no way you can utilize all lead-generating methods simultaneously. Pick three, or four of your favorite methods, and then work them consistently and hard. Just as important, you must manage the process.