Grant Leboff: One of the things that’s really important, I think in sales, and people do get wrong, is defining their marketplace.
Phil M Jones: Yeah.
Grant Leboff: How do you start to look at doing that?
Phil M Jones: It’s a huge question, Grant. What I often see is that the majority of people that want to grow their business, I ask them how much they want to grow it by and they say, “Lots.” I say, “How many new customers do you want?” They say, “As many as I can get.” That’s great, …but not really, because I then say to these same people, “So if I put twenty thousand people outside your front door tomorrow, are you ready to be able to deliver a service to them that makes them go ‘Wow’?” They’ll go, “Oh no. Not right now.” It’s imperative not only do they know who their target is, but how many they want towards that target. The majority of people are looking for anybody and everybody. …You know if you lost somebody you really cared about?
Grant Leboff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Phil M Jones: If you wanted to find the person that you really cared about, you wouldn’t go rushing out into the street looking for anybody and everybody. You’d get a picture perfect description of who that person is, you know, like the missing person poster.
Grant Leboff: Yep.
Phil M Jones: I try and say to clients that define the missing person poster of the people you’d like to join the business because most people are looking to grow, they’re not looking for thousands or millions of customers, it’s ten a month, ten a week, a hundred a year. It’s not a giant number and you can probably see all those faces. First thing to look at is who you don’t want.
You know, there’s so many business hating their customers, I’m like, “You picked them.” So why are you working with the ones that you don’t want to work with? Get that laser focus description in place of what you do want. Think about geographics, think about age demographics, think about other things they might be into like their hobbies, their interests, the types of things that might be out of their vertically or horizontally integrate into. The more you can get a clear picture of who you serve when you’re writing marketing materials, putting events on, you can start to think, “well, would this person like it?” You might even want to go as far as to give that person a name.
Grant Leboff: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Understood. When you’ve defined your market, then of course you want to start building a prospect list and you’ve got a great acronym that you use. Can you explain that to us?
Phil M Jones: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Quite simply for me, if … The bigger the list, the bigger the business, right? You need to have more to shoot at then you’d like to get. So many people I meet are saying, “Well, you know, I’d like to get twelve new customers.” I say, “How many prospects have you got?” They’re like, “Eleven.” That doesn’t work and even if it’s twenty it won’t work. It needs to be big. Before you run into any activity, particularly as a sales professional, building a list first builds confidence and it helps you create …really an endless supply of people. List building is every day. I talk about when you’re building a list, you should start with your friends. Then I work in businesses that say, “You should start running out speaking to your friends.” Then you speak to your friends and they face you some rejection and then people think, “Well if my friends reject me, what chance have I got with a stranger?” Hardest people to sell to are the people that know you best because they know what you were not what you are and they’ll always judge you as the person you used to be, don’t give you the room to grow. I turn friends into an acronym. That’s what you’re referring to right now.
Grant Leboff: That’s right. Yeah.
Phil M Jones: It stands for really, F is friends, but when you’re speaking to your friends, never ever ever pitch them your product or service. Take the thing that you’re looking for, take the person that you’ve described as your target market, and ask your friend if they know anybody that looks that the person that you’re trying to find. What you’ll find that happens is that they’ll either opt in themselves or they’ll lead you towards somebody, they’ll point you in the direction of a future referral. Then, build your list of target market prospects, people that fit that description, by first, you speaking to your friends like I said. The R is your records so these are all the people that you know from your past, the business cards you’ve collected because you said, “One day these might be useful.” Now they’re useful. The I is pretty important, too. The I is industry-related. Everybody’s looking to serve everybody all of the time. The minute you say that I’m a specialist in this industry, it becomes far easier to find people. Not only is it easier to find people when you pick up the phone to them or you meet them and say, “I’m a specialist in this,” then people find it a lot easier to be able to relate. Give a quick example if it’s okay?
Grant Leboff: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Phil M Jones: I built a large overseas investment property business in the past. Our second best year we did kind of pretty well, turned over a huge sum of money, but our best year was four times bigger than that. We used to serve the whole of the world when it came to overseas investments. In our best year, we became an overseas investment property business, specialist in the dentist industry. The minute we got laser focused and said, “We help dentists,” our business quadrupled because dentists went, “These guys are good for me.” Get industry focused and build a list of those. The E in friends, well that stands for e-marketing. Grant, you could talk on that for forever and a day. It’s a huge, huge subject.
Grant Leboff: Sure.
Phil M Jones: We’re on the internet to gather leads, to gather prospects, to further enhance the success we can have, not necessarily to sell people, sometimes just to find more people. The N stands for networking, two types of networking. One if that you meet a room full of strangers and the second is you meet that kind of regular group full of people that are then like a group full of strategic partnerships really. Understand the different in both of them is always to build lists. The D stands for directory. I don’t know if you remember back in the days where the yellow pages was a real thing?
Grant Leboff: Sure. Yeah.
Phil M Jones: That was my first prospect list and they exist day-in and day-out today. For anybody looking to sell, you’re often looking to help people who want to build their business or they want to be able to achieve more sales for themselves. A directory is full of people who want to achieve more sales or make a change, even those little local directories. Tiny tip is that if you’re in the B-to-B environment, if you’re B-to-B and you want speak to somebody who’s listed an advert in a directory, pick up the phone to them, tell them you’ve just seen their advert, and then ask them how well the ad’s working for them. What they’ll always do is they’ll tell you how well the ad’s working for them, the barrier will be down, the salesperson alarm is off, and they will get to a point in conversation where they ask you, “So what do you do then?” That’s your chance to better introduce your product or service and maybe move that towards a meeting.
I did say it’s FRIENDS and not FRIEND, so the S stands for same name. We’re in the people business. I’ve mentioned that in that past. If you take your list of names of people, not companies, people, and then start at the beginning and if I said that the first name was Grant Leboff, who else do I know called Grant? Who else do I know called Grant? I bet I’ll think of somebody and then I’ll take versions of your last name and then that will start to trigger things in my memory, too. What we’re doing is using the existing names on the list to then reference memory points in our own memory and then start to add names and I bet you get twenty percent more names. Start with a massive list full of target market, life gets easier.
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