There Are No Shortcuts to Rural Sales Success

Some people think going to the gym once will make them fit.

Newsflash: it won’t.

What will work is daily and deliberate practice to be the best you can be in rural sales.

You have to put the work in, or you will stay mediocre and middle of the pack which isn’t much fun.

Let’s suppose you hate making cold calls but your area/national sales manager tells you you need to get better and make more sales.

Here are six things you can do:

1. Study cold calling techniques (scripts, templates, cheat sheets – the internet is full of these and many are free – we have a ton of free resources you can access here)
2. Make cold calls warm calls by offering value before asking for value (in the form of a newsletter, article, blog or ebook)
3. Rehearse and role-play cold calls with your colleagues so you’re confident and ready when it comes to the real deal
4. Have a cold-calling system (qualify – contact – secure – follow up – cross-sell)
5. Know your numbers (if you need to make 5 sales a month and you get a conversion rate of 33% then you need to make 180 calls or 3.4 calls a week)
6. Continually test what works and what doesn’t (does changing one word on a script or follow up email subject line make a difference? If you don’t test you won’t know)

The #1 reason that 70% of all businesses fail is due to a lack of sales.

You need to be perpetually prospecting.

Don’t sit back once you’ve worked your way through your prospects thinking your job is done.

It isn’t unless you enjoy the oscillation of massive peaks and troughs that murder your cash flow and commissions.

Go out and find more customers that look just like the ones you serve already. We call them ideal customers or lookalikes. Look for and identify the same traits and attributes that current customers share.

I also want you to think of your prospect pipeline like your very own base fitness.

Fitness comes or goes depending on whether you put in the work.

The same with sales.

You have to continually work to make sure you have a continual number of new prospects in your pipeline you can rely on to make your target.

This puts you in a position of power, rather than being needy in your negotiations or desperate for the deal.

There are no shortcuts to true rural sales success.

Do the mahi, get the results.

+++

I am on a mission to help rural sales and marketing professionals get the respect and results they truly deserve. Please make sure you Follow Me here on LinkedIn so you don’t miss out on my articles.

And if you want to talk, grab yourself your own free 45-minute rural sales coaching call here. I can often spot the same patterns and fix them then and there on the spot.