Prospective customers must have the willingness, the financial capacity, and the authority to buy, and they must be available to the salesperson. Salespersons waste time when they attempt to sell individuals who have neither need for the product or money to pay for it. Salespersons waste time if they try to sell to the wrong persons; so it is important to ascertain which persons in each firm have the authority to buy. Although individuals may qualify as prospects in other respects, they may be inaccessible to the salesperson. The president of a large corporation, for example, may need insurance and be willing and able to pay for it, but a particular salesperson may have no way to make the contact.
In addition to meeting the stated requirements, there are other requirements unique to each company’s customers. Starting the data on the profitability of present accounts, any characteristics typical of profitable accounts but not shared by unprofitable accounts should be detected. These identifying characteristics ideally should be ones recognizable from information appearing in directories or lists. Prospects in many businesses and professions, for instance, are readily identified from classified listing in telephone and city directories. Key characteristics that identify profitable accounts are assembled into descriptions of the various classes of customers, and these are the prospect definitions.
