Brenda Smith has been very successful at getting existing customers to upgrade or purchase new copiers during the past two months. She is, however, disappointed in her efforts to get new customers. To add more new customers, Brenda has been spending a great deal of time prospecting. These efforts have produced a large number of leads. Once she generates a lead, she contacts the firm and tries to set up an appointment. Unfortunately, most of these leads are not interested in talking about copiers and are not willing to schedule a meeting with her. This has been so frustrating that she decided to make several cold calls this week to see if this would be a good way to get to meet with prospective customers. The cold calls were also not very successful and were extremely time consuming. Brenda did finally get a few leads to agree to meet with her, but these appointments were not very productive. The leads were typically satisfied with the copiers they were using and were not interested in learning about NCC copiers.

Jin Tan, her sales manager, accompanied her on a recent sales call to a lead. After the sales call, Jin expressed his disappointment that they had really wasted their time with this meeting. Jin then asked Brenda about her prospecting process because it was clear that she was not identifying and spending her time with the best sales opportunities. Her approach was not working well and was taking a lot of time. If she continued doing the same things, Brenda was not likely to generate many new customers and might lose some existing customers because she was spending too much of her time prospecting.

Brenda realizes that she must improve her prospecting process, but she is not sure exactly how to proceed.

1. What is Brenda doing wrong? What would you recommend Brenda do to improve her prospecting efforts?
2. Explain the strategic prospecting process to Brenda and discuss how she can implement it.