In this article, we’re going to explore the first of three steps you need to take to build your spiral pipeline for prospecting and sales. If you missed our introductory article on the spiral pipeline, make sure to review it here.
Do it right and you can start charting your best sales records ever—month-over-month, year after year.
As your first step, client attraction is where you build the top-end of your sales pipeline, zeroing-in on the most lucrative prospects for your business. You don’t have to reach everyone in this step, just those who meet your criteria for what constitutes your ideal customer or prospect.
Ensure all pathways are open.
There are many pathways for targeted prospects to get into your sales pipeline: website, podcasts, direct mail, cold calling, to name just a few. Get to know them all.
As a sales professional, you can’t afford to just focus on one or two of these pathways and leave the rest to others to look after. Instead, you need to be hands-on, with the goal of being ubiquitous in the eyes of your audience. When someone says: “wow, I see you everywhere,” it tells you you’re doing a good job of staying on their radar. When you’ve achieved that, it’s much easier to turn a prospect into a customer, because you’re no longer to a stranger to them.
Be a helpful expert.
Ahead of all other skills, the best salespeople are experts and problem-solvers. They’re not out there pushing products: they’re available to help people with expert advice in a specific field of knowledge.
How do you make yourself available and get noticed as an expert? By building a platform where you can share what you know.
That platform can include, blog posts, case study development podcasts, newsletter articles and speaking—all with content fine-tuned to address topics that are relevant to your target audience. Think about it like the diagram shown.
You might have noticed that, client attraction activities today mean there’s going to be some overlap between sales and marketing. This is especially the case in large organizations, where marketing has often taken over pre-qualification activities. And that’s okay. Just make sure to work together with marketing to agree on the right content and the right publishing vehicles in advance!
The more opportunities you create for yourself to get in front of your targeted audience, the easier it gets to be seen as a familiar, trusted expert who helps people solve their business problems. The outcome is that your spiral pipeline of sales and prospecting starts to turn and grow like never before!