👿 Steve Hall’s Post

#PROSPECTING - what is it & who should do it? According to the Collins dictionary, prospecting is the activity of exploring a region for gold or other valuable minerals. Note the words "gold" and "valuable". In #sales we have adopted the term to mean looking for potential customers, but let's go back to the original meaning for a second. If you owned a mining company & you were looking for gold, would you hire hundreds of trainees, pay them a pittance & send them off with a pick & shovel? Maybe give them KPIs measuring holes dug or river beds panned? Or would you hire experts - geologists who understand where gold is likely to be found, experieced prospectors who know where to look & what to look for in river beds or other places? In its original meaning, prospecting requires knowledge, experiece & skill. Imagine if mining companies worked tlike sales organisations & relied on activity & volume to prospect. Not only would they find less gold but the land would be covered with tens of thousands of trainees digging it up to no avail. Treating prospecting as an entry level job isn't only ineffective. It screws it up for everyone else. By definition, you want to speak to #decisionmaking people - senior people who can make decisions. But those people are innundated with emails, InMails, connection requests & phone calls. So what do they do? They delete emails without reading them, ignore InMails & don't answer the phone to numbers they don't know. That's what I do? Isn't that what you do? Do you think prospecting is a job for trainees or lower paid people who aren't "good enough" to be an Account Manager yet? Or is there a better way? I think there is. I know there is. But what do you think? #sellingatClevel #stevehallsydney