"Your Business to Business Marketplace Requires a Territory from Your List"

To truly exploit, in a good way, your business to business marketplace you must create a profitable territory from the lists that come your way.

For your cold calling to bring in the bacon you need to know the real differences between a list and a worthwhile territory.

Your worst way to approach your business to business marketplace is with a long list of people you know nothing about. The best way to approach is with a list that is actually a territory of people - who started out on a list that you knew nothing about. Then, you or one of your colleagues contacted them, found out they are well-qualified and welcome another call.

By this definition, a territory is considerably more valuable than an untouched list.

Anyone can buy a list. However, it takes a plan to build a territory. Typically, that responsibility belongs to a front line manager.

One hour of cold calling each day allows a sales professional to reach approximately 800 targets each year. A sales manager should use the information gleaned via cold calls to build highly-qualified 800-name territories.

So, how do you make your way from a list to a territory? Your telephone prospecting process does that for you.

Every one of your business to business marketplace targets go through the basic Lifecycle shown in this chart.

Every dial moves a target a little bit further through the Lifecycle, which in turn determines whether or not the target is qualified. Make sure your customer relationship management system (CRM) assures that each dial is made according to best practices and captures the results of each and every call you make.

Here are five quality stages - ranked by value - that each of your targets go through as your territory develops:

1. Have had a phone conversation and/or schedule an appointment with a decision maker who is both qualified and who has given permission for you to call again.

2. Have spoken with someone other than a decision maker; confirmed who the decision makers is; and understand they are qualified

3. Have spoken with someone other than the decision makers and confirmed the name of the decision maker

4. Have a raw list that has been called through once and you now they are a viable business, however, you do not know the name of the decision maker.

5. A raw list of names and numbers that have not been confirmed as viable businesses.

Don't freak out when your cold calls identify 70% or more of the contacts on your raw list need to be removed! This is not one bit unusual; sometimes this is a bit depressing; until you realize the remaining 30% are valuable because they moved from #5 to #4 or higher.

As you would predict, new sales professional who starts out with a territory of targets listed in #1 has a greater likelihood of success than a new sales professional who starts out with a list of #5 targets. Know that your winning strategy is to develop more and more valuable territories over time.

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