What is prospecting, exactly?
One of my favorite interview questions when I meet sales reps is ‘What is prospecting?’.
Salespeople, perhaps engrossed in their own day-to-day activities, often forget about the traditional definition of prospecting. They may have come to believe that sales prospecting involves dialing thousands of phone numbers, convincing people to take a meeting, or even selling features and benefits of a product or service.
According to Merriam-Webster, the definition is: to go into or range over for purposes of discovery. The example given is soon all manner of people had arrived in the valley to prospect it for gold.*
In reality, sales prospecting fits the traditional definition. It’s just like prospecting for gold. Let’s take the allegory of people selecting a certain valley and going there to prospect for gold which they believe may be hidden underneath the surface. Presumably, there are certain characteristics about that valley which, to an experienced prospector, make him/her believe there is likely to be gold there. Then, there are certain techniques that the experienced prospector must use to determine where the gold is located and extract it.
In sales prospecting, we are selecting certain companies and decision makers with characteristics that make us believe they have active pain or latent pain, which our product or service can resolve.
Notice that we are not selling or convincing. The pain is analogous to the gold. It’s either there or it isn’t. You can scream at the valley, but if there’s no gold underneath, you can’t convince it to appear. Likewise, before you sell or convince your prospect, you have to determine whether they actually are a prospect. By asking thoughtful questions, you can discover active pain or latent pain. Then, once you’ve identified there is “gold” there, you can begin the selling process.
