How to avoid suspects and save time dealing with prospects
I have written a post about approaching the right clients to save yourself time, effort and money. Now this post is about attracting the prospects you want to deal with to save time instead of dealing with suspects that are not likely to buy from you.
A suspect is someone who isn’t likely to buy your product or service. A prospect is someone who is likely to buy your product or service.
How many times have you spent time putting together a proposal for a “prospect” and after all that work they begin to cut down things that they feel they won’t need because they are expensive for them? They cut out everything on the proposal to the point of “uselessness” and afterward you feel you wasted all your time putting together a solution relevant to their problems. They may desire the service, which is good, but when they can’t afford it and not tell you, you end up wasting your time and energy which could’ve been the time and energy spent on a prospect who’s most likely to buy. Not every prospect out there can be your client hence you need to define where you can win.
When you have a good product or service you will attract lots of prospects and suspects you need to know whom you want to deal with and who to avoid. Dealing with suspects can be a time waster especially when you don’t have a staff of 50 people, it can also be frustrating when that time can be invested on things that will help move your company forward.
How can you deal with suspects?
You need to set barriers, barriers that will help you not barriers that impeded on progress. There are two types of barriers:
Active barriers - they are physical things like putting your gym shoes at the far end of the cupboard instead of at the front where you can see them every day which makes it easy for you to reach them. These are hard to identify but easy to fix. Active barriers = (the presence of something that gets in your way)
Passive barriers - are things that don’t exist and make your job harder. An example can be an absence of a notepad and pen on your desk to write your ideas while working. These are frustrating and can be harder to fix. Passive barriers = (the absence of something that gets in your way).
The barriers that we will be touching on today will be a combination of the two because both they can help you sift through prospects and suspects you attract.
For example, you are running a real estate agency and you are selling a house worth R500 million. You don’t want to waste time dealing with suspects who request to view the house, but they can’t afford it or they are not willing to pay the price you are requesting. You will need to create a barrier to prevent suspects to contact you. What you may do is, to ask for a fee of R1000 from everyone who wants to view the house - the thinking is: anyone who can afford R500 million won’t complain about paying R1000 to view it, but someone who can't afford the asking price will complain. Or you can use the same thinking in creating tickets for the prospects to buy which will give them access to viewing the house. The payment of R1000 becomes a barrier, but only to those who can’t afford R500 million.
How do you set barriers?
Define the goal
What do you want to achieve?
In the case of the real estate agent, the goal is to attract high-quality prospects and prevent any suspects from to contact them in order to save time.
Develop
What will the barrier be based on?
When you want to separate suspects - who can’t afford the house from a prospect - who can, obviously, money becomes the basis for your barrier. So the barrier you create would be based on money.
What do you need to develop the barrier?
You need to come up with an idea that will make the suspects give up even before trying and the prospects to feel they are getting into an exclusive deal. Here’s where the idea of creating a form of payment to view the house will be conceived.
Implement
In what format will the idea be in?
The thinking about the idea should be consistent, that is, if you are looking to attract high net individuals you would need to use a medium that is relevant to their stature. For example, you wouldn’t use a flyer for this one but you can collect addresses of all the high net individuals and send them invites that are classy and beautifully designed and wrapped.
What to ask yourself before setting a barrier:
- What do suspects complain about before you interact with them, but the prospects don’t even inquire about them until later? For example, “How much does the house cost?”
- What has made the suspect flee when you mentioned it? For example, “To view the house you will need to pay R1000.”
Other ways of creating barriers:
There are different ways to create barriers which some you might not have thought of.
- How your business positions itself. Is your business positioned as a we-cater-for-everybody type of business or is it positioned as a high-end clientele catering business? Do your business card and website design provide a sense or feeling of high-end or low-quality?
- How your business looks or perceived. If your business cards or website look like you designed them yourself with Microsoft Word, but you want to attract high-end clients that will not work. Everything communicates and how your business card and website looks communicate something to your prospects.
- How your business produces its products or services. If there’s no innovation or something special and unique about your product or service, but you want to charge high prices then your prospects will never buy your products or services.
- What your business gets involved in. If you get involved in things that your suspects value then you will attract suspects instead be involved only in things that you know will get your business closer to your prospects. For example, if you are a high-end catering company you wouldn’t have a collaborative project with White Star maize meal because it’s target market is not people whom you want as your prospects.
The advantages of setting good barriers.
- Barriers keep you focused on a specific market you can learn from and serve better than anyone.
In 210 BC, a Chinese commander named Xiang Yu led his troops across the Yangtze River to attack the army of the Qin (Ch’in) dynasty. When they got there Xiang Yu wanted to kill the hope of retreat from his soldiers so he set their ships on fire so that the only options they had was either victory or death… And they came out victorious in that war.
Having options or thinking you have many options is time wasting and uneconomical. We always urge SMEs to focus on one specific market so that they don’t have a split focus, you get to learn from that market, know it better than anyone else and get to serve it better than any competition in their industry.
- You are able to get the most out of the resources you currently have.
When you are an SME resources are limited and money is scarce, the only thing that you share with big companies is time, so how you use it with the resources and money you have will help you be better than your competition. If you are going to invest your money and resources in things that are targeting suspects then you are wasting your resources and money. You need to define your playing field and put everything that you have in the people who are in that field. You don’t have the resources and time to cater to everyone, if you try to, you will spread yourself too thin and end up losing everyone in the process.
- Barriers will help you provide a high-quality service or product
Barriers help you not to be mediocre. SMEs have a bad reputation especially when it comes to being suppliers of big companies. They are said to not meet deadlines, deliver mediocre work or not even deliver at all. I think this is created by the pressure for companies to be a jack of all trades and because the SME is desperate to get the business for obvious reasons, they make promises they cannot keep. When you put barriers you develop the focus that will help you become a master at what you offer which will help produce good quality work.
As human beings the choices, we make define or communicate the type of people we are. For example, I use an Apple computer because that’s what many designers use to design.
There are websites I visit regularly and websites I don’t even think about because everything I do is a choice that describes who I am, how I think and what I seek out of life which makes up my personality.
The same principle applies to businesses as well. Who you choose to sell to communicates the type of business you are to those people. Do the people you sell to fit the description of the people you would like to sell to? If not do something about that, you can set barriers to attracting the people you want to sell to.
We can help you define where your brand should play and how it can win in that field just drop me an email at [email protected]