First impresssions

After a three weeks and a couple meeting (missed on), I feel this group can be a win win situation. A million years ago when first in sales, I was told the key ingredient was numbers. This meant you make X cold calls a week; from this effort X prospects are defined; and with a couple more steps, a certain amount turn into actual sales, yielding your "closing ratio". I now believe this process to be obsolete and the concept of this blog and people to people meetings can generate real, qualified prospects at a greater rate.

I am looking forward to continued meetings and sharing with the other members any advice, funny stories or actual prospects I come across. My suggestion at the last meeting was to create a "profile" of each member. Creating my Google profile to join this blog this morning was along those lines, but reminded me more of a site geared towards dating.

If possible to incorporate a link or short list for each member which displays on the blog first page, I think that would be more effective. With that process not in place, let me share with you what I believe my ideal prospect would be:

The first criteria is the person be a homeowner or a prospective homeowner or directly involved in construction or remodeling for a homeowner. While I can provide any building product, my focus is on windows. This means a homeowner contemplating window replacement would be a person of interest to me. Certainly, an individual looking to have a home built from scratch is a particular good prospect.

Unfortunately, the process today for purchase of many building products is selection by the lowest cost. Often this choice is made by a contractor, with an eye to providing to lowest cost remodel or construction of a new home. With cost as a selection factor, the homeowner is taken out of the picture. It would be my desire to educate the homeowner, so that he or she can make an intelligent trade off between cost and quality. That doesn't mean that all contractors select products solely on price, but the depressed housing market and economy has put significant pressure on price. Contractors building custom homes do exist and they often make product selection based on quality and reliability. A referral to a custom home builder would be an extremely attractive prospect to me.

On another note, if someone knows of a simple piece of software, allowing tracking of prospects and existing customers I would be interested. The main function would be to capture basic information for an entry and track events and information about the prospect in ongoing selling process. This hopefully, would yield action items or a "to do" list for follow up on each prospect.

That's all for today's blog.