"If yours is like a lot of sales organizations," write Ed Tittel and Carl Eidson in a PRO article at MarketingProfs, "it may have intensified prospecting efforts lately as old customers downsized, cut spending, and, in some cases, went out of business."

And if you follow traditional prospecting advice, your team devotes a certain amount of time each day to make a certain number of phone calls. "The idea," they explain, "is that if you make enough calls, sooner or later a certain percentage will result in meetings, and a certain percentage of those will result in sales."

All of that effort, however, usually returns dismal results. "As a rule, the ratio of unscreened suspect-to-prospect is 10:1, with a prospect-to-sale ratio of 3:1. Which means that the suspect-to-sale ratio is 30:1." Adding insult to injury, these ratios also demoralize your sales team, who get used to hearing "no" far more than they hear "yes."

So how can you prospect more effectively and efficiently? Tittel and Eidson recommend three action points:

• Don't pursue anyone and everyone. Quality matters more than quantity, and the strongest prospects are "the ones who are not only more likely to buy but also more likely to buy from you."
• Start by asking if they're good for you. "[E]ach 'suspect' company should be carefully vetted," they say, "through pre-call research and compared with a profile identifying what's most important for your organization in predicting the probability of a sale."
• Then ask if you're good for them. "That requires asking a different set of questions, focused on understanding how you can deliver high value a customer would be willing to pay for."

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