Sales Business Development

Sales prospecting or business development is a key activity for most sales driven organisations and for most sales people. It is also the cause of demise of most sales careers. Business development is a skill and must be mastered if you are to sustain a long-term sales career.

The current volatile economic environment, sagging consumer confidence, increasing customer distrust, more informed customers and tougher competition have put excessive pressure on Sales Teams in all companies making it harder and harder to get out there and develop new business.

As a professional salesperson you:

• are facing growing pressure as others compete for your accounts,
• find yourself having to discount to bring home deals,
• struggle with sales cycles that just seem to get longer and longer

If that’s not bad enough, you still have to struggle to maintain a full pipeline. Do you ever wonder how others seem to manage?

The fear of rejection

Do you dread the “prospecting” part of sales? Do you find the constant rejection excruciating?

Whilst effective prospecting is a critical component of sustainable sales success, it is not selling. Whilst as a salesperson, you may be a well trained in selling skills and product knowledge; you may not have learned specifically about prospecting. Business development is mostly learned through trial and error and unfortunately for many, ends up as a career disaster.

Effective training and coaching, tailored to suit each individual salesperson and their own specific issue around prospecting/business development, will have a huge impact on your sales revenue. It shouldn’t ever take a suit of armour and great gulps of courage to deal with the issues of fear of rejection during prospecting. It takes understanding and a plan.

Effective business development/prospecting requires a plan

Winning sales people recognise that to be effective at prospecting, it should neve