Sales Manager And The Phone Book Prospecting Trick

Writen by Lance Winslow

You know there are still some sales managers out there who instead of insuring proper amounts of qualified leads for their sales force will instead throw a new salesman or woman a darn phone book and say good luck, there is the phone? Oh great the new salesperson thinks.

Now-a-days you cannot call people on Do Not Call Lists, so instead these phone books only work when calling government white page listings or yellow page business sections. Which if you company sells to businesses seems to work okay.

Unfortunately the sales managers who do this make a few mistakes because each salesman ought to know a little something about the industry sector they are calling on first. I can tell having been in business a long time and generally the first listing in each business sector we were in that depending on the listing we would get different sales people from the same darn company calling us.

For instance we do pressure washing and cleaning and are in sections of Automotive, Marine, Aircraft, Trucks, Real Estate, Concrete, etc.. So, the "A" section; we would often get called by one person and the rest of the alphabet later in the week by other folks. What really irks me is that so often the person calling did not understand our business and wanted to sell us janitorial supplies, toilet paper, cleaning products and just went on and on.

Silly and pathetic and this would go on for two-weeks or so and stop. Then in six-months it would start up again, same darn company. But it was not just that company, so many companies do this, but none of them seem to train their salespeople understand the businesses that they are calling first. I hope if you are a sales manager you will figure it out and do it right, so, consider this in 2006.

Lance Winslow