“To know your prospect, you must become your prospect.”
- Ancient Chinese Proverb
This quote came from a salesperson who knew how to get an appointment.
Getting the first appointment with a prospect is getting harder year after year, and making yourself relevant to the prospect is the first step in overcoming that challenge.
As a daring and ambitious salesperson on the search for customers to serve, you must seek relevance like a duck seeks water. The question is how.
How Salespeople Become Relevant to Prospects
Referrals, case studies, and endorsements as a solutions provider are the best choices.
But what do you do when the prospect is unknown to you and you're not experienced in the category?
A freely given tactic is to spend five minutes thinking like you're the prospect. This means five whole minutes of you having your prospect’s job and their problems as they relate to you.
Once you have this mindset, Google search your problems. As an example only, let's say your prospect is the person responsible for new patients and/or revenue at an Urgent Care Medical Clinic.
1. Search “Marketing tips for Urgent Care Medical Clinics”
2. Pick out the best sources, likely the trade groups, and businesses that are serious about generating revenue. Skip the blog from Nurse Mable that are not at a high enough level. This is the internet after all.
3. Write down how to develop the effective strategies that “Urgent Care Medical Clinics” are using such as:
- How they differentiate themselves from other medical providers. They seem to have many competitive advantages so they have a story to tell.
- How much is a woman with children and insurance worth to them? More than you guessed.
- What matters enough to that woman with children that would cause her to choose your prospect over the competition? Community relations are important. What is your prospect doing during “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.”
- Why is “name recall” so important to them? Because when these women need an Urgent Care doctor, they need it right NOW. It’s rarely planned.
- Mama’s not taking her children to a doctor without seeing the staff and facility online. So they need an online and social strategy and doctors aren’t good at that.
Do you have some capabilities that match some of those issues?
These are just the top five, and it only took five minutes. So be relevant. These people won’t be hearing about these topics for the first time because it’s the shop talk of their industry. But if your approach to them is relevant to that shop talk, then your chances of getting that appointment just multiplied.
*Editor's Note: This blog was originally written in 2019 and has since been updated.
