Relationship Selling - Targeting

In our final installment of relationship selling, we're going to cover the final piece of the overall puzzle, targeting. Please understand that these few articles are not all there is to relationship selling. Books have been written on the subject. There's a whole thing about personality types and how to deal with them. But for our purposes, targeting will round out our discussion. Hopefully, after reading this article, you will know just how to target a prospect and how to know when to cut your loses.

That last line may sound a little strange to you, so let me clarify. Not everybody is a prospect. Think about it. If you are selling a cure for baldness in men, are women going to be in your target market? What if you were selling hot rod autos? It is quite unlikely that a person in their 70s is going to be interested in driving a hot rod. Okay, not everybody is a prospect when buying products.

And not everybody is a prospect when selling an income opportunity. Not everybody wants to make money on the Internet. And even for some who do, not all of them want to make it a full time career. Some want to just make a few bucks on the side. So, if you're pitching a program that is going to make somebody a six figure income, not everybody is going to be interested. Conversely, if you're pitching a program that is specifically designed to just make a few extra bucks each month, the people who are looking for residual income that they can retire off of will not be interested in what you have to offer.

So the question becomes, how do you know if somebody is a prospect or not? This answer may come off as being a wise one, but it's not. It's the way you do it. How? You ask them. That's right, you ask them. The rub is HOW you go about doing that. You don't come out and say, "Are you a prospect?" For one thing, they're going to look at you like you had two heads. No, you have to be a little more subtle than that.

I'm a very straight forward person. What I do is simply ask somebody what it is that they're looking for. I ask them what they want out of an online business. I ask them what they want to earn. I ask them to tell me about their interests and their skills. I get as much information about them as I can. I really show my interest in THEM. Finally, after they have answered all my questions, I evaluate the answers and make a determination, based on those answers, as to whether or not I think the person is a prospect. Am I always right? Well, in the cases of the ones where I think they are and it turns out they do nothing, it's easy to know the answer to that. But for the ones I let go, there is no way to tell. You just have to make your best educated guess based on the evidence. Just don't try to recruit everybody because some people will be very obvious as to where they fall in the equation.

Is this an exact science? No, it's not. But if you go about the process in just this manner and make an educated guess, you're going to be right more times than you're going to be wrong.

To YOUR Success