By Jonathan Farrington, The JF Consultancy

Having a strategy to acquire new customers is vital because customers are lost over time for a variety of reasons. Additionally, if you are serious about sales growth then you’ll want to ensure that your salespeople become competent ‘Hunters’ of new business, as well as ‘Farmers’ with their existing accounts.

This process can become so much easier to exploit if you have a prospect pool that you can encourage your sales people to follow up on. Yet, what do you do if that pool dries up?

Imagine having qualified prospects calling you…no, it’s not a dream, and it’s a real possibility if you use this simple, yet extremely powerful process. You’ll need to invest some time to develop the first step, yet, ultimately you could discover the easiest prospecting approach ever created!

The solution is to produce a white paper that reports on the biggest problems facing the prospects and customers within your industry. Then to position yourself as ‘the credible expert’ you’ll need to write up a range of solutions designed to address these problems. You’ll then be in possession of a compelling document that you can promote for free. If you’ve correctly identified the problems then you’ll discover an avalanche of people (who happen to be great prospects for your sales people) requesting your masterpiece.

This approach is also aligned to the biggest motivational strategy on the planet; people will do anything to avoid pain, and then once they’ve avoided it they’ll want to gain pleasure. Your report can effectively serve to highlight and reinforce your prospects’ pain then tantalise them with the pleasure they can get by implementing your solutions.