Q. I’ve heard you mention several times the importance of prioritizing and targeting customers. Can you shed some more light on this?
A. This is a key issue with me, as I believe it is one of the ways to make the biggest, most rapid change in your results. Too much good quality sales time and talent is squandered on customers who aren’t worth the investment. If I can help sales people adjust their investment in time so that they are spending more time on the high potential and less time on others, they’ll see an almost immediate improvement in
results.
So, over years of trial and error, I have developed a simple but incredibly powerful system for prioritizing and targeting accounts. While I don’t have space here to describe the whole system, I can suggest several things you can do to institute this practice in your sales team’s routines.
First, you’ll need to make sure everyone understands the difference between ‘potential’ and ‘history.’ Too many sales teams prioritize their time on the basis of history. In other words, “A” accounts are those who spent the most last year. In today’s rapidly changing economy, I don’t think it’s wise to make decisions based on the past. A more powerful and useful concept is to make decisions based on the future. So, a
high-potential account is one who could buy the most next year, not one who did last year.
