A few weeks ago, our marketing director and I were discussing a change to our blog – we like to keep it fresh by changing themes, timing, etc. every few months. When he asked me “what do most of our clients struggle with?”, I answered immediately: finding new business. Every business wants new customers, to capture market share, and to take business away from their competition. Unfortunately, most system integrators, managed service provider, and manufacturers struggle finding, and winning, new business.
So, why don’t we do it? What’s the number one reason we don’t generate new business?
We spend most of our time in reactive mode, and finding new business is a result of 100% proactive behavior. For the most part, there are two reasons we function in reactive mode …
- No one reminds you to be proactive. Potential new customers don’t call you if you don’t reach out to them in a creative manner; networking partners don’t complain to your boss if you don’t schedule strategic meetings with them; and current customers don’t leave you because you haven’t taken the time to penetrate other departments to find more business. If you’re hitting your number, no one really cares if it’s new business or not. However, if you forget to update your CRM, turn in your expense report late, or your service department is late to a customer site, you get calls, emails, text messages, etc.
- Finding new business is hard. Taking care of reactive activities is easier and more rewarding than proactively pursuing new business. To many sales people, anything is easier than prospecting. Ninety percent of prospecting for new business is rejection – not much fun. However, spending four hours driving to a current customer site to check on a camera (even though two dozen other people in your company could’ve taken care of it) is easy and rewarding.
So, if one gets immediate praise for something that’s easy, and rejected for something that’s hard, what are most people going to do?
How can we reverse this? We can’t keep others from reaching out to us, expecting an immediate response; and there’s not much we can do to make new-business prospecting easy. It was hard 75 years ago, it’s hard today, and it will be hard 75 years in the future. (That’s why we sales people get paid the big bucks.) However, understanding these dynamics will allow us to implement a plan that can turn any sales professional into a new business machine. Tune in next Tuesday for the plan…
