Consulting Services

At this time, I am principally engaged in my regular business and in my writing. I am currently unavailable for consulting on most small projects, and I am continuing to develop more ways to serve small businesses through my writing and my website offerings. In the end, I am a small business owner, and I am most predisposed to find ways to serve the needs of small business.

While I can and have done consulting work in the past, today it’s rather pricey for most folks (@ $5,000/day plus expenses). Consulting work relates first to developing and understanding your company’s “plan” for prospecting. When deriving a prospecting plan there are a variety of issues to consider.

• Are individual salespeople responsible for finding their own leads?
• Does the company intend to provide qualified leads for its salespeople?
• Do you intend to use a combination of company generated leads and leads generated directly by individual salespeople?

Depending on your answers to the above questions, different tactics must be utilized to create a prospecting system that will have a good chance of success.

Making Prospecting a Partnership

A key issue is your prospecting list and how it is segmented for development. Personally, I prefer a centralized prospecting database and an approach that involves a partnership between individual salespeople and the company in the area of prospecting.

In such a partnership,

• The company wins because it can intelligently and systematically engage its market over time (i.e. fewer undeveloped market gaps, less loss of qualification data, helps build a “branded” company-to-customer relationship over time, achieves lower development costs over the long term, etc.)
• The salesperson wins because he or she more easily gains access to qualified leads (i.e. less turnover, less stress due to prospecting problems, better opportunity to develop individual sales skills, less time spent on non-sales activities, facilitates building customer relationships, etc.).

With a companywide partnership in prospecting, everybody wins. The company can purposefully wrap its arms around its target markets and effectively develop those markets. Salespeople can focus more on selling and will have a greater chance of success when they more easily engage a larger number of better qualified leads over time.

Still Think You Need Some Help?

In most cases, consulting work is best done in a group setting where there are many salespeople who need help integrating a broad system for prospecting through a companywide effort. If you really are serious about creating a training program shaped in the fashion of Prospect Factory for your mid to larger sized company, I have staff and resources available to accommodate such projects on a case by case basis.

For more information, please email Jan at: palmettopublishing@fuse.net