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Have you properly invested your time and attention in developing a prospecting plan? Discover a range of helpful tips for building a strategy for your prospecting efforts in this episode of TechBeat Bytes, featuring Jason Caywood.
Nexus CEO Earl Foote was joined by Jason Caywood on this recent episode of TechBeat Bytes to talk about the necessity of a well-thought-out prospecting plan for businesses:
Jason Caywood is a sales executive with over 15 years of experience leading and developing teams. He was also a client of Sandler Training for over 12 years where he experienced the transformational impact of the Sandler System on his personal and professional life. Jason has built territories and teams from the ground up, all over the country, regularly outgrowing the market by 4x-7x.
Jason is a proud native of Utah and loves helping others reach their maximum potential. In his free time, Jason enjoys spending time with his wife and three young children. He is an avid outdoorsman and enjoys hiking, camping, and fishing. Jason is also a passionate musician and enjoys playing the electric guitar.
“When things are going well, companies often stop looking for opportunities to improve,” says Jason. “They leave millions on the table when things are going well.”
One of the most serious threats of initial success is that it can make you complacent. When a small company gets its first break, starts generating profit, and enters a new echelon of business, the leadership will often slow down its efforts to continue growing.
This is why a prospecting plan is so important. It ensures that available opportunities will be capitalized upon and that growth will be steady. It takes the human element out of how a business is driven.
Jason likes to think of a prospecting plan like a good cookbook, or a tried and tested recipe. It’s a consistent, carefully edited process for achieving the same ideal results each and every time.
In the case of marketing and sales, it could be knowing that you need to make “x” number of calls per day in order to gather “x” number of leads. You follow up on those leads with “x” number of marketing initiatives and book “x” number of meetings with potential clients. These meetings then yield “x” number of new clients in a given time period.
It’s really as simple as that. The hard part is developing and following the plan in the first place…
A key point of failure that Jason noted in this episode is that managers and business leaders can often be focused on one specific part of the business development pipeline, rather than the big picture itself.
At the beginning, everyone will focus on prospecting, and load up the marketing, sales, and development pipeline with a lot of leads and potential new business. However, as soon as those leads start converting into new clients, the leadership will then shift their attention to service and management.
“It’s this constant up and down,” says Jason. “Prospect hard, get new clients, get them on board, and then start again.”
Soon enough, the pipeline will dry up, because no one has been focusing on prospecting. This is why you need a plan in place; it ensures that no matter how many new clients you’re gaining day by day or month by month, you’ll still have consistent prospecting work being performed.
This will promote continual growth and protect you against attrition and loss of business as you rapidly acquire new clients.
“Prospecting should be non-negotiable,” says Jason.
In this episode, Jason shared the prospecting plan model that he teaches to clients every day in his work with Sandler Training. The KARE model ensures businesses have a consistent prospecting pipeline in place.
Here’s the simple part: following the model is simply a matter of asking the same two questions about each stage: What is the behavior I should be engaging in and at what frequency in order to (Keep/Attain/Recapture/Expand) clients?
While this may seem like a big project to undertake, Jason recommends that you start small. Pick one basic task associated with each of the four quadrants of KARE to start trying out.
“What are some small ways you can begin to develop this new habit,” says Jason. “The goal is to know when you perform these tasks, you’ll hit your numbers.”
This can be as simple as just calling your current clients here and there to touch base and talk about new opportunities. It can be a few cold calls a day. It can be researching on LinkedIn to see if a past client is in a place where you could recapture them.
You don’t have to overcommit yourself to your prospecting plan. You simply have to have one (however small) and commit to following it.