Meet 
My 32 year sales career is divided into two periods. Pre-1983, I was a sales professional employed at three computer companies where I specialized in the sale of Hospitality Industry Computer Systems.
Post-1983, I have been a self-employed marketing consultant and sales prospecting trainer with the singular mission of successfully installing my tactical Power Prospecting® Formula at companies and coaching their b2b sales team members to become profitable practitioners.
During this post-1983 period, I conducted 1,876 paid workshops and seminars for trade associations and client company sales audiences throughout North America.
While I continue to pursue consulting assignments and occasional speaking engagements, I am actively developing my online brand and presence with multiple websites and relevant blogs.
My 32 Years of Sales Experience
Unlike many sales professionals who began careers in other fields and gravitated into sales, I fulfilled my 1961 High School Yearbook’s prediction of, “Someday, Training the World’s Greatest Salesmen”.
At Junior College, I worked part-time as a commissioned vacuum cleaner salesman for Sears. Following my FSU graduation, I worked as an overseas exchange student in the Marketing Department of Swedish Exxon in Stockholm. I’ve always enjoyed the challenge of understanding and satisfying the marketing needs and buying motives of population segments.
Since 1983, my mission has been to train business to business sales professionals and small business owners how to painlessly and systematically get new customers.
To execute this mission, I developed the Power Prospecting® Formula, a prospecting for new customer’s formula developed in 1967 and fine-tuned over the following 16 years while I was a territory account rep with three computer companies and an eventual National Sales Manager at one.
The formula is a tactical hands-on, non-strategic process, specifically tailored to the everyday needs of those in the sales trenches. It merges a proven effective set of techniques with the use of the latest office technology to deliver a process for painlessly and systematically getting new customers.
There are two distinct components.
- First, on behalf of each participating sales person, a low volume personalized direct mail campaign is automatically mailed weekly to 20-50 decision-making prospects. The mailing sets the stage for a timely follow up phone call. It provides just enough information to tease the prospect’s interest so they are looking forward to the sales person’s promised phone call.
- The second component is the timely follow up phone call. Call purpose is to qualify the mailed decision-maker’s near-term need, authority to decide and to communicate a concise understanding of what the sales person sells.
Most often, near-term need equates to a prospect’s pain threshold, where their degree of urgency may result in their near-term conversion from qualified prospect to satisfied customer. The complete Qualifying Phone Script fits on 1-side of 8 each, 5” x 8” index cards.
This winning combination of a low volume personalized direct mail campaign with timely expected qualifying phone calls eliminates cold-calling, a distasteful activity scorned by many and feared by a few across the sales profession. Prospecting for new customers has now become the natural starting point.
Providing sales professionals a non-threatening process for successfully accessing and qualifying decision-makers, before they leave their offices saves time, streamlines sales cycles, and enables Power Prospecting® Practitioners to focus their sales skills on prospects with qualified needs who are more likely to become near-term customers. The key: focus on the few with urgent needs and book their business!
FACT: if you invest the majority of your sales day in front of thoroughly qualified decision-making prospects with urgent needs for what you sell, you will write more profitable new business, more often and consistently earn the income you deserve. Isn’t this why we became sales professionals?
Another decided benefit is there is a 1 page paper accountability tool to complete so sales professionals aren’t bogged down with useless, time intensive paperwork.
Mission Accomplished!
Street-Tested and Proven Successful
This formula came about when I worked at NCR as an entry-level account rep in 1967. It saved my then-endangered new sales job and accelerated my career progress as I ascended the corporate ladder. In 1973, it culminated with my appointment as National Sales Manager for MHS (Moby data Hospitality Systems) of Utica, NY, NCR’s leading Hospitality Industry competitor.
With each new sales territory assignment, I was presented an opportunity to fine-tune my new business prospecting formula. Improving the responsiveness of the direct mail piece; editing qualifying phone follow-up scripts to make them more conversational; replacing closed-ended with open-ended questions and always, striving to improve and simplify the few accountability tools which were part of this evolving formula.
In 1978, after leaving MHS, I relocated to Orlando where I started Mr. Mailer, Inc, Central Florida’s first personalized direct mail laser-letter processing facility. Over the next 5 years, we processed 18,000,000 letters on behalf of 192 b2b and industrial clients in Florida and Georgia.
During this period, the Power Prospecting® Formula was tested and fine-tuned in 55 Industries from boiler sales and maintenance services to outbound telemarketing sales of needlepoint kits.
With the 1983 sale of Mr. Mailer, Inc., Leads-Plus, Inc., my current sales training and marketing consultancy, was formed so I could focus exclusively on marketing the Power Prospecting® Formula.
Since then, over 560 companies of all sizes have applied it to their business development needs. From Republic Steel’s Storage Products Division, selling warehouse management systems, components and services through their nationwide dealer network to Inacomp Computer Centers, a 1986 INC Magazine Growth Company Honoree and a nationwide chain of IBM-Authorized Computer Resellers.
Even, Mom and Pop size b2b enterprises have adapted my Power Prospecting® Formula to their needs with one tried and true common goal: to painlessly and systematically get new customers.
|
