Many selling/recruiting professionals work hard every day contacting every contact that comes their way and many times never realizing while there may appear to be a lot of activity there, in fact there may be little real productivity. One way to focus the activity so that it equals productivity is to study the quality of your present customers to be able to better identify from future prospects and qualified potential next customer.

Analyze your present customers to determine if you in fact have a larger percentage of your business coming from a trend of “types” of segmentations. This trend, which most sales professionals have, whether they realize if or not, is referred to as a “Profile.” Once a sales professional recognizes that they tend to connect with certain types of prospects better than others and that in fact more of their business may be comprised of these specific types of prospects, then they can focus their immediate energies each day to ensure that all of those like prospects are being connected with.

Commonly referred to as the "80-20 Rule" it is purported that an Italian land owner and economist recognized on day as he took inventory of the Italian countryside that 80 percent of the land and wealth was held by 20 percent of the people. So too is true many times in business, that 80 percent of our business is held by 20 percent of our clients, COIs, VIP, and market segments. And the reverse unfortunately is true of many unsuccessful sales professionals that they spend 80 percent of their time with those customers that constitute only 20 percent of the business.

To accelerate ROI on your endeavors, recognize for both your personal efforts and the organizations efforts, identify the characteristics of the core customer base, who are they, where are they and how many more of them are there that are not being contacted.

Examine your present customer base, analyze the patterns and trends and commonalities among them to determine if in fact there are some common ingredients among a pool of customers. If so, develop this into a Profile that can serve as a map to finding more future customers like them – as you know these are already successful users of your organizations products or services.

This Profile is a critical turning point in sustained successful selling, as all future marketing, advertising, promotional and selling efforts can be fine tuned to speak to these people first. Once you have a profile of characteristics, write them down on a sheet of paper. Now look at each entry one at a time, a determine what the questions are that you need to ask of every next person you meet to determine if they possess these similar profile traits, characteristics, elements.

Now analyze within the “Sales Funnel” (eArticle #13) how many Prospects did you have to contact to matriculate each individual Customer? Then analyze how many suspects you had to contact to matriculate that Prospect? Now you can tighten that contact loop and become more proficient at contacting and working each contact to shorten that selling process and amount of time invested to make a sale.

What are your thoughts on shortening the selling process?