What Does Great Sales Prospecting Look Like? The RIMS Model

Posted by James Fennessy

Sales prospectors have figured out two important aspects that make for great sales prospecting in both successful and credentialing: find a target-rich prospecting environment, and then develop a message rooted in one of the three value creating methods described above. Huthwaite summarises this process in a four-stage prospecting model called RIMS. Research: Success rates for prospecting depend primarily on knowing where to look. Too often for salespeople looking to prospect, research means little more than assembling a list of companies and/or individuals who seem to fit the right demographic. Great prospectors know that this is only the beginning.

Assembling a target-rich sales prospecting environment means having some starting hypothesis as to why a given prospect may be interested in what the seller has to offer. Developing such a hypothesis begins with an analysis of the problems or issues that the seller has recently solved for current clients. Why have current customers chosen to do business with the seller? The focus is not on why they chose the seller over the competition, but rather, why the buyer sought to buy products and services from anyone. In short, what buyer problems or needs has the seller encountered in the marketplace?

With this insight, the seller can then look for companies that may be experiencing similar problems. Using marketing data, public information, etc., the seller should look for needs or problems that are both current and urgent from the buyer’s perspective.

• Current issues are those that seem most prevalent in the marketplace.
• Urgent issues are those that have the immediate attention of business leaders.

The mistake so many sellers make is to look for customers who are “in the market” for the products or services they represent. Though this will have some success, it is a tough way to make a living. Avoiding this needle-in-a haystack approach requires looking for customer problems or needs that the seller can address. Remember, products and services look more and more like commodities to the buyer community every day. If value creation requires sellers to uncover unforeseen problems, to craft unanticipated solutions or to broker the full resources of their own organisation, none of these things centers on products or services per se. The centerpiece of such efforts is the outcome such products and services will produce for the buyer.

The retail sector contains a good example of this, where many Wall Street analysts have begun evaluating hardware retailers based on “Days of Sales in Inventory.” This is a recent switch from the traditional “Same Store Sales” figures that had been the primary metric for evaluating financial performance. Of course, it is far easier for the Wall Street analyst to make this change than it is for retail executives to reset inventory controls and reorder protocols. A good prospector who represents a hardware manufacturer might hypothesise that inventory management has new urgency and currency in the retailer world. If the seller could potentially help in this regard, a prospector might look at retailers who appear to have excess inventory or who Wall Street is punishing even if “Same Store Sales” have been good.

The first step in great sales prospecting, is to identify prospective buyers who will have an urgent and current business need or problem. Through research, a seller can assemble a target-rich environment of companies who are likely to be in such a receptive mode.

Implications: Unless the seller is prospecting the CEO or some other very senior business leader, the issue identified by the seller during the research phase will be recognisable to the prospective buyer as a set of problems.

Consider, for example, a situation where a manufacturer is experiencing margin pressure from foreign competition. Foreign manufacturers with cheaper labor costs are pricing their products far below that of the domestic producer. If the buyers of these products perceive little or no difference between different offerings, then the domestic producer will suffer significant margin and price pressure. But only the highest level of the organisation will experience the issue from this perspective. Sales managers in such an organisation may experience this issue in the form of salespeople complaining about a need for new and deeper discounting. The production manager may feel this issue as pressure for greater cost-cutting or for the use of cheaper raw materials. The marketing manager may feel this issue as pressure for new marketing campaigns with a “buy local” theme. The prospector, then, must think through how the issue will manifest itself as a set of problems felt by the people in the various buyer roles.

Once the seller has derived a set of problems from the issues identified in their original research, the next step is to develop a set of implications arising from these problems. That is, what kinds of consequences might these problems have on the prospect’s business or operation if the problems go unaddressed? It is vital that the prospector complete this part of the process before beginning their first effort at contacting new suspects. Keep in mind the three value creating efforts. Thinking through the implications of potential problems is where a seller can refine the material for value-creating messages. Let’s return to our example.

For the production manager who experiences pressure to cut production costs, we might hypothesise that these pressures could force layoffs and extended hours for the remaining workers. This might in turn lead to a decrease in plant safety and greater accident rates. Greater accident rates would surely result in lower morale, higher workers’ compensation insurance rates and more frequent OSHA inspections and inquiries.

Listing out the implications of the unresolved problem, then filtering or contextualising them for the target prospect audience, is the raw material for developing great sales prospecting messages.

Message Building: At this point, the effective prospector begins to craft the kinds of messages that will garner a great response rate from the target-rich pool. It’s vital to have something insightful to say about the suspect’s business. A good message demonstrates that the prospector may have an interesting perspective on something about the suspect’s business. Continuing with the example of our production manager, we could create a message that uses one or more of the implications resulting from the issue/problem thought process. For instance, the prospector could leave a voice mail message for the production manager that mentions, “We have seen many companies that are feeling pressure from foreign competition and that are experiencing unacceptable increases in worker accidents and turnover rates. We believe there is a direct relationship between how a manufacturer chooses to meet the foreign challenge and their safety and turnover records. I would be eager to discuss how this might impact your manufacturing operation.”

The main point in this example is to see the dramatic difference between what a customer-focused message sounds like as compared to the typical seller-résumé message most prospectors employ.

With practice, and by using the seller’s own experience in the marketplace, the seller can formulate these kinds of buyer-focused, problem/implication-derived messages. Our research has shown that every great prospector uses these ideas in some form to distinguish themselves from the torrent of uninteresting and uninformative solicitations received by their prospects. Before leaving the subject of messaging, however, four hints about prospecting messages can serve as guidelines for any seller looking to improve their prospecting success.