5 Keys to Successfully Selling Small Business Owners

Today, I recieved an email from one of our newer reps asking me for advice on the steps he must take to succeed. He wants to acheive the goal of $10,000 per month in residual within 18 months and so I decided to publish my response as a blog article.

Here are the action steps that will lead you to your goal of $10,000 per month residual:

#1 – Walk into 20 business per day for your first 3 or 4 weeks.

#2 – After your pipeline is full in 4 weeks separate your time into three categories: Prospecting – Walking Into a business where you have not yet spoken to the owner. This includes businesses where the owner was not in the first time you came or those where you set up an appointment. Primarily, these would be businesses you have never walked into before.

Follow Up – Walking into a business where you have already spoken to an owner but you have not closed the deal. Maybe they promised to give you a statement so you could do a free analysis or you got the statement and you are going back to close the deal or they simply asked you to follow up another time because they were too busy. Customer Service – Spending time with customers including installations, customer service and relationship building. This is the key to your success in later adding POS / Web to your income.

Spend a minimum of 2 hours per day Prospecting and no more than 2 hours per day on follow up. If you get to the point where you are spending more time on follow up than you are on prospecting, you have too many prospects that are not really interested, pick your best prospects and tell the rest to call you when they are interested so you can get back to prospecting for new business and focusing on the prospects who are moving forward in the sales process.

#3 – Consistently follow up with existing clients to learn more about their needs so that you can offer them POS / Web solutions in the future. You need to have an intentional process for building relationships with your clients that doesn’t take too much of your time but allows you to stay in touch. I primarily use email and LinkedIn to accomplish this task by sharing articles I think they will like. I also stop in to their business once per month to have a face to face interaction.

Most sales people stay in touch only with their “Problem” customers and this is a huge mistake, because they can’t sell those people anything else. Minimize your time on these problem accounts by focusing on solving problems and taking action quickly to get them back on track and always carve out time to spend with existing accounts just to find out how business is going and what challenges they are facing.

I hope these tips help you succeed!
James Shepherd

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