Let’s Hear It For The Old Fashioned Business Getter!

We know that these days cold calling by phone or face-to-face is not going to be very productive, or look very professional. However, winning new business will always be required.

SalesPathways has evidence that salespeople who are given all their leads to follow up become less resourceful and generally less pro-active in winning conquest business. Their dependency on others starting the sale seems to deskill them, making them, at best, only business developers. Aligned to this issue is appointment making. We have also discovered that the more senior the person you are attempting to make contact with the harder it is to achieve on behalf of the salesperson. When the salesperson is making contact directly the senior decision maker is (relatively) more suggestible to seeing them. This puts the skills of winning new business at a premium.

We have seen that one of the key measures of sales success is the ability to generate new business from a salespersons’ own resources. This doesn’t mean that another don’t make appointments for them, or leads aren’t passed over, but when there is a core requirement of being (some what) self-sufficient the salesperson has been shown to be more successful.

The salesperson that can generate new business from new customers is more likely to generate new business from existing customers, but interestingly not necessarily the other way round.

A new business mentality needs to be stimulated through the focusing of activities that reinforce its importance. This ‘winning business’ mind-set then tends to ‘infect’ everything the salesperson does.

This is much more significant than the old Hunter/Farmer debate. The binary nature of that position, where you are one or the other is not helpful.  The modern B2B salesperson needs to be capable of the duality of growing their own pipeline with new opportunities (even if they then mobilise their organisation to support the execution) and at the same time harvesting all opportunities from their existing customers.

The business getting salesperson is a much more potent force than the simple business manager.

SalesPathways have several tools to help develop your sales teams business winning capabilities, for more information contact:

Lynn Joy
T:  01789 734400
E: lynnj@salespathways.com

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