Counsellor Prospecting

Finding Good Prospects

When competition is stiff, sales professionals cannot waste time on aimless searching to find new prospects. Instead, they have to be on target right from the start, quickly and efficiently finding the people and organisations that qualify as likely customers. A salesperson who is able to properly prospect will make the difference between winning and losing in business. Counsellor Prospecting will show your salespeople how to win business and get ahead of the competition right from the beginning of the sales process.

Many organisations believe prospecting is a numbers game. It is often seen as the act of keeping the pipeline so full that everyone is viewed as a prospect. Salespeople spend great time and energy trying to get one sale out of every 30 prospects. Counsellor Prospecting (CP) shows salespeople that it does not have to be this way. Rather than focusing on finding more suspects to put in the pipeline, salespeople should focus on finding better suspects and higher-quality prospects. By doing this, salespeople can change the ratio with a more effective and efficient process.

Program Outcomes

Counsellor Prospecting trains salespeople to make better go/no-go decisions about prospects earlier in the overall sales process. This helps avoid costly customer contact efforts with prospects who are not beneficial for the seller’s business. It empowers salespeople to choose the good suspects who are most likely to become good prospects.

Learning Approach

Wilson Learning believes that learning must be transferred to day-to-day work practises. To achieve this, CP includes components and activities that enhance Participant Readiness, Learning Transfer, and Organisational Alignment.

Participant Readiness prepares salespeople and managers for the overall learning experience:

Pre-workshop communication

Learning Transfer design embeds practice and use of new skills. The learning is delivered as a one-day face-to-face, application-oriented workshop.

All can be delivered in modular format over non-consecutive days to allow application between sessions. The face-to-face workshop can be taught by a Wilson Learning facilitator or by an organisation’s own leader-trained in-house professional.

Organisational Alignment ensures the organisation supports the use of the new skills:

Post-learning reinforcement activities are available for both the manager and salesperson.

As a result, Counsellor Prospecting (CP) becomes part of your organisation’s selling practises, benefiting customers and increasing productivity.

Enabling Improved Performance

The Counsellor Prospecting Planner tool helps salespeople apply the structured approach they learned during the program to the often unstructured “real world” of selling.

Counsellor Prospecting can be easily tailored to your organisation’s sales process by your organisation’s training professionals or with the support of Wilson Learning consultants.

Management coaching is essential to the reinforcement and effective use of CP. As a highly recommended option, Wilson Learning facilitators can provide coaching in order to focus on the specific skills developed in CP.

To discover how we ensure learning is reinforced and applied for improved performance, see our Learning Transfer Approach.

Evaluation

Measurement of the impact of this program can be achieved within the scope of your existing sales reporting system. Existing reports on your pipeline should show improving ratios from “suspects” to “wins” as your sales-force improves the quality of leads they actively pursue. As an option, Wilson Learning can consult with your organisation to determine which sales reports and measurements most accurately and fairly indicate the impact of this program and can work with your sales managers to account for other factors. Wilson Learning’s goal in this option is to ensure that your measurement of the impact of CP is fair and credible.

Wilson Learning will partner with your organisation to measure the initial behavioural changes and business results. We will work with you to set up evaluation systems that help improve outcomes and sustain the momentum of your implementation.

To learn more about measuring the impact of learning, visit Measurement and Evaluation Services.

This offering, like all others from Wilson Learning, can be customised to reflect your sales environment and business priorities and can be integrated with your sales process.