How traditional prospecting works
Cold calls, walk-ins and mass emails, chosen by gut feel and whatever’s on the way. Sometimes it works. But it eats time, and the message is the same for every account, so it rarely reaches the person who has the problem.
Five shifts
| Shift | Traditional | Sales acceleration |
|---|---|---|
| Reactive to proactive | Wait for the customer to call. | Know what they’re likely to need and bring it up first. |
| Generic to specific | The same pitch at every stop. | Pick up where this account left off last time. |
| Quantity to quality | More stops, more calls. | Fewer, better stops at the accounts most likely to buy. |
| Transactional to consultative | Take the order and leave. | Ask questions, solve a problem, earn the next visit. |
| Push to pull | Interrupt people who didn’t ask. | Be the rep they call when something comes up. |
Start with the accounts you already have
For most field teams, the quickest wins are already in the territory.
- Define who you sell to best. Look at your best accounts and write down what they have in common.
- Rank your accounts. Which ones buy less than they could? Which stopped buying? Which haven’t seen a rep in a while?
- Plan the visit. Before you walk in, read the last note and check the open follow-ups.
- Mix your channels. A visit, a call and an email work better together than any one of them alone.
- Check and adjust. Once a month, look at which visits led to orders and change the plan.
Ask your team: which five accounts in your territory should have seen you this month and didn’t?
Where Voze fits
In Voze, the last visit’s note and the open follow-ups sit on the account, so the next visit starts where the last one ended. See Voze for reps and how Voze works.
What it changes for your team
Reps spend their time on accounts that are likely to buy. Customers get a rep who remembers what they said last time. Managers coach from what happened on the visit.
It helps marketing too. When reps’ notes say what customers keep asking about, marketing can answer it before the next visit. The Voze blog has more on working with marketing.