Sales Management pre-approach

Pre-approach is an important stage in the sales process that means gathering and analyzing all important information about prospect before engaging him or her in the selling process. The salesperson should try to obtain as much available information about the prospect and his or her needs as possible before contacting the potential client. If pre-approach process is not well-organized and debugged, the sales manager may face the problems mentioned below.

Unaccounted details of prospect specificity

Before approaching the prospect the salesperson should try to gather available information about potential client, his personal characteristics and organizational relationships. In the future it will help him to analyze client’s needs, range of his/her requirements and develop individual sales approach towards this client. It’s important to find out who is involved in purchase decision making, what can awake this particular person’s interest and what benefit of the suggested product should attract client’s attention.

Moreover, it’s necessary to determine the best method of approach. May be it should be a telephone call, personal visit, letter or e-mail, etc. At first sight it’s a trifle, but it may have an influence on the successful result of the deal.

Other important detail that should be defined beforehand is the best time period when salesperson should contact the client.

These questions are common and should be defined before the interview with the prospect and must’t be missed. If the salesperson does’t have a checklist of the questions that obligatory should be taken into account before approaching the prospect, he or she can easily forget some detail that may be decisive for client’s positive answer.

By taking into account any slightest point concerning potential client and developing individual approach strategy to each client, salesperson demonstrates that the prospect is special for the sales company and deserves a special approach. It may become a good foundation for successful relationships. And vice versa missing any detail about the prospect may lead to loss of a contract.

Non-organized database of prospect’s information

If the salesperson wants to affect a successful sales operation and establish further friendly relationships with the identified prospect, he/she should try to gather all possible information about prospect’ needs and desires, his/her activities and so on. But if this data is not properly stored, it may become of no use and reduce to zero all efforts that were made to gather it.

All details that the salesperson obtained about the prospect, should be kept in such a way that they can be easily accessed, tracked, grouped and filtered.

Non-organized working process

As there are a lot of tasks that should be done against each potential client, and there are many prospects to be worked up, sales manager can easily forget to make some important call, write urgent letter or may get mixed up with the tasks that should be done first and others that can be postponed. If the salesperson does’t have a clear daily and weekly To Do Lists, he or she won’t stop to make mistakes while gathering the information about the prospects and developing the approach strategy. Only creating Task List for the day and week and assigning the deadlines, priorities and reminders for each task, the sales manager can work effectively and successfully.

Life-buoy

Don’t think that the problems mentioned above are insuperable obstacles. The best solution to overcome them is to use specific sales software that has all required features to manage sales process and in particular its pre-approach stage. Such software is VIP Task Manager.

It’s perfect sales automation software that can greatly lighten your work on preparing for the contacts with the prospects. With the help of VIP Task Manager you can create a template of the things you must find out about the prospect and his/her company, at the same time you can keep everything that you managed to learn into a database. You can use VIP Task Manager for keeping all information about your customers' needs, their contact information, methods of approach, etc. The data in this database can be easily tracked any time you need it.

Moreover, VIP Task Manager allows you to create To Do Lists for sales managers that will help them always remember what should be done and in what order.

How to use VIP Task Manager in your Pre-approach process

• Start VIP Task Manager
• Create a new task group ‘Prospects’
• Open task group ‘Custom fields’ option and create your own fields, for example ‘Age’, ‘Sex’, ‘Method Type’, ‘Contact time’ and other fields that are necessary to learn about the prospect
• Create a new task, for example ‘Prospect 1’
• Enter the required information about this prospect into task custom fields
• Sort the prospects by any required field, set filter or group by certain attributes, if required
• Create a new task, for example ‘Send the introduction letter to prospect 1’
• Set a reminder not to forget about the best time period to contact your prospect
• Attach the letter of introduction as a file to this task
• Set priority and status to this task
• If the task repeats frequently, set its recurrence
• Set filter for your To Do List and make report on your work by printing out the tasks or exporting them to Excel

Go to the next stage of Sales Management Process - Approach

Groupware tool

• VIP Task Manager is synchronous groupware for task management. This client/server software allows planning, scheduling, sharing, tracking and reporting tasks, appointments, projects, and any company activities. Authorized users can simultaneously access the common database through Local Network (LAN) to see, add, edit and delete their team or personal tasks, if they are granted appropriate permissions.