January
2009
Patience is a Virtue of Success
A salesperson asked me – “how long should I keep someone on my prospect list?” I think the best answer to this question comes from Napoleon Hill, who wrote - “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success”.
Having patience in sales is definitely a virtue. Unfortunately, many salespeople and businesses in general don’t have the patience or the persistence and apply the perspiration to achieve success for long term sales and marketing results. The temptation for quick results and an immediate response is what keeps many salespeople focused only on the HOT leads.
When you have a long term plan for prospecting and developing relationships, you will reap the rewards of your investment in time, persistence and effort. When the salesperson asked me this question, I quickly remembered several situations where prospect took over two years to develop. Time was needed to nurture trust and wait for the right timing for a relationship to mature.
When the question of how long will it take for a prospect to purchase comes up, we should ask ourselves, how long we are willing to wait and nurture the relationship. I can think of many situations that last as long as or longer than two years. One example is a Canadian customer finally succumbed to my nurturing a relationship after two years. When he finally purchased, I looked back at my records to realize that it was over two years of consistent mailings and an occasional telephone call that kept this prospect interested. If I had stopped my efforts, the sale would have been lost.
One of the ways to nurture long term relationships is to have a sales pipeline of events that don’t require you to expend energy or time to execute. There are many systems that can do this for you and I want to show you what a drip marketing event might look like. When you have a system that does this for you, you can keep track of hundreds of prospects who aren’t ready to purchase now, but will at some point in time. You just have to be patient.
Here are a few features your sales pipeline system should have:
1. If you use email, use a system that will track and notify you when the prospect is active in their interest with you. This can be done by several companies that monitor open and clicks on links to the email message you send.
2. Your communications should be personalized so you maximize your impact with each letter or email you send. The timing of these events should also be consistent with the best practices of selling and marketing.
3. You should have a reminder system built into your sales pipeline so you are reminded to call the prospect when they should be called. This would be based on best practices too.
By: Steve Martinez the Sales Magician for Business Development
Http://www.sellingmagic.com (951) 277-0080
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