The customer is king. The customer is also changing his or her mind about what they want regularly. You have to exploit this, and protect yourself from the downside of change, by expanding your market continuously. And it is not just you that needs to keep in touch, don’t forget the other people in the organisation.
We all have a background from one part of business before we start on the business of our dreams. We come from production, sales, finance or wherever and this dictates some of the emphasis that we put into the business. One of the advantages of coming with a sales background is a complete understanding of the disciplines of prospecting.
Salespeople also know that when you are selling you are not delivering and earning revenue, and when you are delivering and earning revenue you are not selling. It is easy to let your business life reflect this in a cycle – easy, but dangerous. A hole in the order book now is a hole in the cashflow, in about two months’ time. This delay can give you a false sense of security especially when you are busy delivering and find it hard to fit in what needs to be done in that part of the business let alone add selling time. But that is what you must do. In order to have an efficient data center operation, you should also have professionals work on your Structured cabling needs.
Set aside an hour each week for prospecting – finding new clients – or more if your business demands it. During this hour make your phone calls or send out your mailshots or devise your new brilliant gimmicks for generating potential customers. Never, ever miss it out. I always do it on a Monday morning since that tends to be the time that other salespeople are in their weekly meetings or touching base with their offices or whatever.
Don’t waste prospecting effort. If you send out a mailshot and you are in a business where you need to follow up with a phone call, i.e. most businesses, don’t send a huge number out at the same time. Send out enough that you have sufficient numbers to ring to fulfil your prospecting quota. This drip-feed technique has the added advantage that you have to go back to it on a regular basis, thus automatically putting the hour-a-week discipline in place.
