I blogged about the importance of prospecting a few weeks ago. Specifically about how several clients had this at the top of their list in terms of strengthening their team's capabilities.

I worked with 2 of these clients in the past week and saw the focus again. It was interesting to see people going back to the basics of territory planning. Something that is so simple and so straightforward, yet not always easy to do. In both cases we talked about territory planning and simply analyzing the customer base and prospect base early in the year in order to optimize selling time. One conclusion we came to is that there are many criteria that could be used to drive an analysis of a customer base: value/size; their perception of us; customer satisfaction; additional opportunities; competitive threat and effort expended, among others. Similarly, there are criteria for analyzing a prospect base, such as: value; strength of current provider; strength of our value, among others.

One set of key criteria we factored in for both scenarios were more sales process related: strength of coach network; amount of available information; strength of gatekeepers, and access to decision makers. These criteria can make a huge difference in our future success and we should include them in any worthwhile analysis.