Why Salespeople Shouldn’t Go Prospecting
So, before I get murdered by angry sales managers across the globe, let me clarify what I mean when I say salespeople shouldn’t prospect. Many business owners, managers and even salespeople themselves feel that salespeople should prospect, and indeed most B2B salespeople should at least go through the experience of prospecting, it’s a great learning experience, and it builds character and skills.
While it’s fine for a salesperson to do a bit of prospecting in his or her spare time, I would submit that systemically, salespeople in a B2B organisation should not be spending a lot of their time prospecting. Why?
This argument arises directly from the definition of a salesperson:
A salesperson is someone who sells, or closes deals through communicating and guiding the right value.
By nature, a salesperson is a persuader, an influencer, and an expert at the decision with which he is helping the client. He or she would be highly trained in product knowledge as well as business knowledge, so that he can understand the main concerns of the business owner or decision makers that he has to convince and influence. He would constantly have to upgrade his knowledge and sales skills, dialogue range and presentation techniques.
He would also need to be familiar with common objections, good at building rapport and goodwill, and be able to turn around sticky situations and last-minute issues. People with this calibre of knowledge, skill and technique are firstly, fairly rare, and secondly, require a long training period to onboard.
It takes six to nine months on average for a competent B2B salesperson to build his or her sales pipeline and hit full stride in both prospecting plus sales.
Furthermore, competent salespeople are very highly sought after, and without paying an arm and a leg, it is unlikely that organisations can attract many of them easily.
Even with good pay, they wouldn’t always join your organisation. This means that sales ‘closers’ and salespeople themselves are very much rare specialist resources for the company. Their time is extremely valuable.
It’s all about good use of the salesperson’s time.
Salespeople (Sales closers) have the following characteristics:
- High face-to-face effectiveness
- High costs to the company
- Long lead times to build up sales pipeline
- They are difficult and disruptive to replace
- Require large investments in ongoing training
They’re much akin to the ‘finisher’ blow, or coup de grace, in a sales process, and should be treated as such. Lead generating or prospecting, whether done at events or elsewhere, is a relatively menial and a set of very different skills from sales closing (see What is the Sales Close?). Furthermore, lead generators are generally cheaper to hire.
Using your highly skilled salespersons as prospectors is like using an elephant gun to kill a mouse.
If you use salespeople as lead generators, you are taking away the time of highly skilled experts when they should be in front of interested clients, closing more sales for your company. It’s an exercise in overkill.
Be sure to split your lead generation and sales roles for maximum ROI.
In order to maximise your company’s sales effectiveness, you should implement the Prospector/Closer Split, or the separation of roles between people who do lead generation, and those who run and close sales.
What does this separation of activities and roles entail? It means you will have a number of lower skilled lead generators, constantly feeding leads and appointments to one highly skilled closer.
This format is used in large companies like Salesforce.com and other US tech B2B businesses for a reason: it enables each role to better specialise, increasing focus and reducing disruptions.
Further, because the skills differ, you can recruit them separately.
Generally:
Lead Generators need:
1. Great rapport building skills (friendly, interested in others)
2. Good follow up (emails, SMSes, calls)
3. To direct appointments to sales closers
Salespeople need:
1. Sales techniques and skills
2. Persuasion skills
3. Negotiation skills
4. Self-drive
5. Strong product knowledge
So, if you do choose to implement a Prospector/Closer Split, how does it look in the numbers?
Lead Gen + Sales Combined vs. Lead Gen Split From Sales: Comparison*
(* Assumptions at bottom of page)
Case 1: 3 Salespeople: 3 people doing lead gen + and same 3 doing sales closing (all-in) 50% split between lead gen and meetings
Cost: $12,000-$18,000 monthly ($4,000–6,000 / month each)
Leads generated per month (10 of 20 workdays for 3 people): 1.5 appointments * 10 days * 2 slots per day * 3 people = 90 leads per month
Sales appointments per month (remaining 10 workdays for 3 people): 2 appointments per slot * 2 slots a day * 10 days * 3 people = 60 sales appointments per month (max capacity)
Leads wasted: 90–60 = 30 leads wasted (there are 90 leads but only enough time for 60 appointments in the remaining time)
Sales closed per month: 60 sales appointments * 20% = 12 closed sales
Sales per $1,000 payroll = 0.67 to 1.00
Case 2: 3 Lead Gen, 2 Sales Closer
Cost: $14,000- $21,000 monthly ($2,000– $3,000 / month per lead gen, and $4,000 -$6,000 per salesperson)
Leads generated per month (20 workdays for 3 lead generators): 1.5 appointments * 20 days * 2 slots * 3 lead generators = 180 leads per month
Sales appointments per month (20 workdays for 2 sales closer): 2 appointments per slot * 2 slots a day * 20 days * 2= Up to 160 sales appointments per month
Leads wasted: 180–160 = 20 leads wasted
Sales closed per month: 160 sales appointments * 20% = 35 closed sales
Sales per $1,000 payroll = 1.67 to 2.5
You can see that the standard way of using salespeople for both lead generation and prospecting generates approx 40.1% fewer sales than splitting up the roles, assuming you balance the lead generator and salesperson numbers properly over time.
Would you continue doing something that could be costing you up to 40% of your potential revenue?
It’s a bit of a no-brainer which format would benefit your company more, and it’s high time most of us updated our sales playbook- these practices have been established for over fifteen years in large firms (like Salesforce.com).
There’s no reason why small companies cannot enjoy the same advantages too- all we really need to do is to keep an open mind, and execute accordingly, keeping what works, and discarding what doesn’t.
About The Author:
Kevin Ng is Managing Director of Thunderquote.com , ASEAN’s one-stop sourcing & procurement marketplace for businesses, with automated buyer guidance for pre-sales project scoping and market rate data.
By doing so, the ThunderQuote platform generates genuine, high-intent and qualified leads for business owners and salespeople.
*Assumptions (standardised across both cases):
A good lead generator or salesperson can book 1.5 appointments (average between 1–3 from a 4 hour event or prospecting slot, including followups) per slot
A competent salesperson can close 1 sale in every 5 sales appointments (20%), and takes 2 hours per appointment including travel.
Hours per workday normalised at 8 hours / day
