By Jonathan Viney, director of JV Consultancy Group 

Prospecting is the first part of the sales process, which every organisation should have. For sales, you need a prospecting process and prospecting techniques to build up a range of companies that you can then potentially sell to.

If you had to get 10 sales per month to achieve your target and you have a success rate of one in every three people that you talk to, you need 30 sales qualified leads to talk to each month. To get to those 30 qualified leads, you may need 100 people's contact details that you need to prospect to buy your products and services.

The first thing is to refine your suspect list. Before they become a prospect, they are a suspect. You need to qualify your criteria. It may be geographical, it may be a certain industry type or there may be a size of company which is more suitable for your solution.

You need to understand your own business and what your potential purchasers' needs are - their geography, industry, size - rather than go out there with a splatter gun approach and trying to reach out to everyone.

With prospecting, you then need to allocate time and resources to do it. You've worked out who, where and what you are going to target. Unfortunately, when it comes to sales, most people don't allocate time for prospecting. Most people chase people they are close to selling to, have a very successful month, but don't realise that there is nobody else left to talk to. So you have the situation of feast and famine.

To overcome that, you know you need to get 100 new people to talk to every month to get them to the 30 who would like to buy something. So how do you approach and find these 100 people? You need to allocate an amount of time each week when you can do that.

You have then got to work out what you do in that time. How many of your leads come from networking, does your prospecting come from mailshots that you then follow up with a telephone call? Do you advertise?

Whatever route to market you have, you may need to build up on average 10 leads per month by doing two networking events, 10 leads per month from your website and 10 leads per month through advertising etc. You then have a recipe with the right ingredients to get the right number of leads.

Prospecting in its idealistic area is where you are going through those different processes and activities. Over time, if you measure which customers come from which activity you do, you can work out which prospecting activity is most efficient and effective.

Nothing happens, in terms of results, unless you put the effort in. If you know the activities and tasks that work for you, you need to do those things consistently and the reward will be a high-performing team, with better and bigger sales. After all - time really is money.

For more information, contact JV Consultancy on 01242 858943, email jv@jvcg.co.uk or visit www.jvcg.co.uk.