the art of leading

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Prospecting

Salespeople need to find others to make their presentations to. They need to find potential clients. If they don’t, who are they going to try to sell to? Leaders also need to prospect. They need to find people willing to listen to them, and they have to try to turn them into repeat costumers, or followers. That’s common sense. There’s one common mistake, though, that many salespeople and leaders make when prospecting: trying to convince EVERYONE.

Doing that may be fine at the beginning. After all, you need to get a feel for your audience, and seed out the most effective methods of finding followers. But ultimately, the smartest way to go about it is to concentrate your efforts in the groups that you have seen are most open to considering your proposal. This implies using economies of scale. For example, a luxury-goods salesperson may not do so well trying to sell his products in a poor neighborhood. People who live there don’t have the buying power to buy those goods. It would be a bad strategy for that salesperson.

In the same way, a leader who wanted to liberate India from English rule, as Mahatma Gandhi did, wouldn’t focus his energy in trying to gain followers in the rich class of the United States. That group had very little connection to his mission! That doesn’t mean Gandhi wasted opportunities to add anyone to his cause. In fact, one of his principal strategies was to persuade rich English men and women that his was a cause worth fighting for. But the most important prospects were found in the poor lower castes of India. Those were the groups that felt the harshest effects of English rule. Those were the groups that were starving to death. They were the ones who had the power to change the course of history, and Mahatma Gandhi knew that. So he focused most of his efforts in trying to convince them. He knew they would be much more open to his message.

Categories : Communication, General Leadership //