Five ways to determine which are good prospects

All prospects are not created equal; some are more likely to turn into sales. To avoid wasting time, you need to weed out the poor prospects and concentrate your efforts on prospects who will yield a return on your investment of effort, money and resources.

The following five steps will help you distinguish good prospects from bad prospects:

1) Define your target market precisely. Break your market down by demographics ie geography, market, company employee size etc. This will enable you to focus on the prospects that match your target audience.

2) Assess need, budget and the prospect’s purchasing authority. Ask basic questions that will allow you to determine whether a prospect is ready, such as:

What's the timescale for this project?
Who else is involved in making the decision?
What's the budget for the product or service?
How will the decision be made?
Is your company ready to purchase if the right product or service is found?
If you decide that our product or service meets the need, what will the next step be?

3) Ask for a “yes” or "no." Conventional thought says that as long as the prospect hasn't said "no," then the sale is still possible. However, when it comes to rating prospects, get a decision, even if it's no. It’s better to find out sooner rather than later that the opportunities of closing a sale are slight.

4)  Evaluate the prospect's financial position. Creditworthy prospects are better than high-risk customers. Stable prospects are better than customers going through widespread changes. A company that is merging or downsizing may delay buying decisions.

5) Develop a sales lead scoring system. Rate prospects by a letter or number grade, based on the possibility of closing the sale. Concentrate on A or B prospects, and upgrade or downgrade the other prospects as circumstances change.

Top 10 PR Tips

1) Talking about doing PR isn't as good as actually doing something. Waiting for the best story to happen can take a while, it is better to get something out there

2) Have a steady stream of appropriate PR to editors seeking your content

3) Read the up-coming Features list and try to put some PR relevant to the feature

4) Find a PR company that can make something out of your product or service, that you might think is normal

5) Use pictures with your PR to help Editors to visualise your uniqueness

6) 'The more you write the less gets read' good PR companies have learnt to be brief and to the point

7) Recycle old PR with a fresh new slant, in some fringe publications

8) Good PR agents will find a good story by just interviewing your customers

9) Fully written-up Testimonials with pictures are like gold, you can use them for PR and for sending to prospects in your marketing materials

10) Measure the success of your PR with clippings, but allow time for editors to start using your submissions

A technique used in public relations is to identify the specific target audience, and then to tailor every message to appeal directly to that audience. The audience can be a general, nationwide or worldwide audience, and it is often a segment of a entire population. Marketers often refer to "demographics" such as "black males 20-40" for example. In public relations an audience is often more fluid, being whoever a company wants to reach. For example, recent political target audiences include "soccer moms". There is also a grouping based on fitness, eating preferences etc.

As well as audiences, there are stakeholders, people who have a "stake" in a specific issue. All audiences are potential stakeholders, but not all of the stakeholders are audiences. To provide an example, a charity enlists a PR agency to produce a campaign to raise money to find potential cures for a disease. The charity and the sufferers of the disease are stakeholders, and the audience is everyone who could donate money.