At the highest levels, it might be accurate to say that selling is about convincing someone to purchase a service or product. However, that alone isn’t going to help you in a sales position.

You need to know how to both find and develop potential customer leads. You’ll do this via sales prospecting. This tactic is a vital component of making a sale and is more critical now than ever because it allows you to develop your customer pool.

Prospecting in the Sales Cycle

When we refer to sales, in most cases, we’re looking at a series of events that need to happen. This “structure” has been in place for over a century now and is agreed to be the basic order of operations:

Attention -> Interest -> Desire -> Action

Sales prospecting is concerned primarily with making sure that your leads go through the first two stages of the cycle – they become aware of the product you want to sell (attention), and they show a desire to learn more about the product (interest).

These two stages are vital for you as the seller because they help establish you as a trusted advisor – someone who brought the product into the customer’s vision and taught them about its benefits.

Why is Sales Prospecting Important?

Sales prospecting has always been a critical component in making a sale, but now more than ever, it is mandatory for success.

There’s a couple of reasons for this. First, the typical customer has become cynical towards sales representatives and people just pushing a product. The oversaturation of the sales world means that most people actively tune out basic adverts and ignore attempts from sales reps. By prospecting, you can become a trusted advisor who has built up a relationship with the customer and earned their trust.

Second of all, prospecting is good for pushing out your product or service towards people who might not know it exists. The main goal of sales is to get people to purchase something, but expanding your demographic is often the best way to do that.

Given that we live in the era of opt-out ads, introducing people to a concept or service that they might like is incredibly important. Ultimately, sales prospecting allows you to bypass the restrictions of people who choose not to interact with advertisements.

Final Thoughts

So, sales prospecting allows for the successful development of a relationship with a potential customer. It’s not enough to just push a product anymore. People are more discerning than that, and they have less interest in blatant advertisements. It’s important to build up a relationship and become a trusted advisor, somebody who has recommended a product based on their experience and this is more important than ever before.

It’s definitely a sign of the times that the sales process will have to shift towards more subtle methods of marketing. Directly advertising isn’t as successful as it was 20 years ago, because people have become desensitised to those types of marketing techniques. It’s more about building a positive relationship now, and if you can do that, then you will have more success in a sales career.