Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Seven Ways to Prospect for New Accounts

We all know that companies must grow or they will die. The same thing applies to rep firms. You must keep growing your business, adding new customers, and increasing your sales. Too many times reps will find three or four major customers and then rely on them for their income going forward. Not only is this a very bad move but it also drives their principals crazy.

I can’t count the number of times my clients have told me that they can’t get their reps to find new business anymore. They say something like, “Sure they have brought us a couple of good accounts and we are all making money on those, but now I can’t get them to find me some new accounts. They have not brought in a new account in two years!”

This is an extremely bad scenario but unfortunately this is often the case. If you are a rep and you find yourself in this example, you’d better do something about it because this is the number one reason that rep firms are terminated from long-time contracts. The principals, growing increasingly impatient with their reps' lack of activity, end up cutting them loose. Don’t let this happen to you.

You call yourself a sales representative and by that very definition this means that you are always out there selling.

To help you out a little, here are seven ways to prospect for new accounts:

1. Know who you are looking for: You have to know what you are looking for in a customer. It should not be that hard to examine your principals and identify the kind of companies and technologies to target.
2. Create an ideal customer profile: Once you have determined what type of companies you service and what their technology requirements are, develop your ideal customer profile. This profile will include several customer characteristics such as technology, service, market, value for your services, ease of doing business with, and many others.
3. If you are a smart rep, you have several non-competing lines selling different technologies of the same basic product; this is a good thing because it allows you to get more bang for your prospecting buck. One potential customer could need products from more than just one of your lines. A company that buys PCBs, for example, could have a need for everything from military rigid PCBs to flex and rigid-flex boards to heavy copper boards, which means that you can sell them a complete PCB solution using two or three of your lines.
4. The approach: Once you have decided which type of customers you are going to target, match those types with real companies. By going online, with surprisingly little effort you can find the companies you want to target by matching their needs with the ideal customer profile template you have developed. From this you will develop your list of target accounts.
5. Warming up a cold call: The next step is to approach these targets. You could call them but I recommend doing a little more prep work before you do that. Develop an email newsletter specifically focused on those companies you have targeted. Send two or three of these over a month. After a while you’ll pick up a trend of who is opening these e-mails and reading them and from that list you can send a very specific e-mail newsletter outlining how you can help them fill their specific PCB needs; this is what we call warming up the cold call.
6. The cold call, or in your case, the nicely warmed up cold call: By now they know your name, they know who you are and have a good idea what you must offer. This is the time to call and set up your live meeting. You will be pleasantly surprised how much easier this will be now that you did your prep work.
7. The big meeting—that first appointment. Once again preparation is key. Research the company and find out everything you can about them so that you are fully prepared when you make that first sales call. Make a call plan and write down what you want to get out of this sales call. In many cases, all you’re going to do is establish rapport with the person you are meeting; and your goals should be to learn about his company and their needs. Try to ask more questions than you answer—in other words, shut up and listen. For that first meeting to be successful you must get two things: what that company’s PCB needs are, and what you must do to win their business. Wait, there is one more: Get a commitment for the next step. Once you leave the meeting, make a summary of all that you covered including any commitments that the buyer made to you and send this to her in an email.

And in the spirit of under-promising and over-delivering, there is one more step, and that is to follow up in a way that goes beyond the normal follow-up that the buyer is expecting. Send him a book or an article about something the she talked about and that pertains to her job or her company. That way you are completing that circle of engagement on two fronts: the first business as usual on a vendor/customer basis, while the second front establishes the engagement on a more equal partnership basis, which is the way you want to grow all great customer relationships.

It’s only common sense.

Dan Beaulieu is a 30-year PCB industry veteran, and sales and marketing expert and writer who has contributed to numerous industry publications, on topics ranging from sales and marketing, to board shop performance.