Sales 101: What is a prospect?

If you said “small businesses” are your prospects… you are wrong.

If you said “everyone” is your prospect, you are very, extremely, outrageously wrong.

“But Jason, we have a product we sell to small business owners. How can I be wrong?”

The truth is, while we wish EVERYONE could be a prospect, sales is a numbers game. So, if you are out and about looking for leads the old fashioned way, you need to clearly separate who are your leads and who are prospects.

A lead is a person you meet. You could walk past them on the street, connect with them on LinkedIn, or maybe you gave them a free t-shirt last week while you were out marketing. But they aren’t a true prospect until they are willing to go through your sales process. Switching a person from a lead to a genuine prospect is where many sales people fail, which ultimately results to them trying to sell to a whole bunch of the wrong people.

If you start with a list of 100 leads and send them a blanket email, you may only end up with 6 genuine prospects. So, let me ask you something… would you rather waste this whole week on trying to sell your service to 94 uninterested people? Or, would you rather just go through your 6 true prospects, make 6 sales, and move on? You are going to get a lot more sold if you are only focusing on selling to the right people, I promise you.

Cheers to not wasting anymore time.