November's Marketing Tip for ESA Members

“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary” – Vidal Sassoon

Step One: Acquiring Prospects

What exactly is a prospect? A prospect is a potential client who is in need or may become in need of your environmental services. Finding qualified prospects for your environmental services is the natural first step in the sales process. How do I “acquire” prospects? Who is in need of my services or may become in need of my services? Environmental services are a very vast market arena and you can become lost and overwhelmed in who to market to. Typically your first prospects to acquire are realtors, lending companies such as banks, private mortgage companies, and real estate investment firms and property management companies.

After you have contacted the typical prospects, now move on to other arenas. These may include; city and county code officials, allergists and pediatricians, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), insurance adjusters, home inspectors who do not perform environmental services, remediation contractors, general contractors and the general public. The market for environmental services is so vast you will find other prospects than what is listed.

Once you've identified prospects, you'll want to learn all you can before you approach them. "Fact finding" will help you; determine your sales approach and plan your sales calls; determine which environmental service best suit particular prospects; uncover reasons why you should not pursue some prospects, saving you valuable time and resources.

You can acquire prospects in many ways. However, you must be careful in how you acquire them as you could spend more money on acquisitions of prospect lists and advertisements than you are receiving in income from the jobs. The way in which you can acquire prospects is very simple, get a list of realtors in your area via the internet, look in the yellow pages for the prospects that have been mentioned, or purchase contact lists from a mail house.

Another way is “the more you question - the more you learn!” What does this mean in attaining prospects? Here is an example, you walk in to ABC Bank Co. and ask if you can speak with the maintenance manger and they say “we do not have one”. Oh, ok can I ask who does the upkeep and inspections of the building, and the person at the desk says “Joe at XYZ Real Estate comes when we call or he comes in once a week to check in”. Ok great and he does a good job for you? Well, let’s say he comes when we call.

From this questioning you now have two potential prospects, the bank because they are not happy and the real estate / building management company because they may be in need of your services.

"The most productive sentence in the salesperson's vocabulary always ends with a question mark."

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