When you have no prospects all you can think about is finding a way to get prospects.  When you get those prospects you quickly find yourself overwhelmed because now you have the obligation to follow up and follow through with all those prospects until they either buy, or exit your sales funnel.  My friend Jonathan Farrington recently wrote a post about dealing with feeling overwhelmed with prospects.  His post got me thinking.

I get a lot of calls from people who tell me they need more prospects.  They are convinced what they want is prospects.  Yet, it doesn’t take long to get to what they really want.  Even though they are asking for more sales prospects or leads, what they really WANT is paying clients.

Money in the Bank Today

They want paying clients because those clients mean money in their bank accounts now.  They want clients yet they mistakenly think they have to ask for prospects to get those clients.  When that really isn’t the case at all.

Even though it can seem like mission impossible when you have zero prospects getting prospects isn’t all that difficult.  Because it’s not really all that hard to get prospects you quickly discover that once you get what you ask for… you start feeling overwhelmed.  You quickly find yourself overwhelmed because you try to manage those prospects manually when there is no need to do that.

Automate the Relationship Process

There is no need to manually manage all your prospects even though you think you have to.  The reality is it’s very easy to nurture and develop relationships without a hands on one-one-one approach.  Once you can do that you open the door to leveraging both your resources and your results.

Here’s the reason you ask for prospects when you want clients.  You ask for prospects because you already know your message is not powerful enough to trigger an action, or unearth motivation.  You are trying to push prospects to you when you could easily lead them along a path they already want to follow.

Tug of War

So rather than coming together in a positive way you end up in a tug of war with the very people you want as clients.

When you ask for prospects what you are doing is trying to find ready buyers among all the prospects you’ve gathered.  Rather than helping the people who are already looking to buy find you, you are trying to push the people you’ve connected with into a buying decision.  As you already know that’s a tough sell.  Plus it forces you into trying to control things you can’t control.

You can’t control when someone will become a ready buyer.  Some of the prospects in your sales funnel are apathetic about buying your services.  They know they probably should, and they’re thinking about doing some BUT they just aren’t motivated to do anything about it now.  Some are thinking they need to do something and are in the process of researching their options.  The ready buyers have already decided they need to buy and they are ready to do so right now.

Circumstances outside your control, frequently outside the control of your future buyers, can instantly change an apathetic prospect into a red hot buyer.  These sales prospects move from potential money in the bank to real money in the bank right now.

Every business needs both sales prospects and people you are ready to become clients right this instant.  The thing is you don’t have to settle for just prospects and work yourself to death trying to push those prospects into ready buyers.  You can set you primary focus on the ready buyers.  The prospects will follow.

This is so important I wrote “How to Get More New Clients in 9 Days” to help you get those new clients in your business now.

Coach Cheryl

Do it Yourself

Do it with a Little Help

Do it with Guidance

photo credit: Toronto Rob

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under sales marketing coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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