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Among the most common complaints I hear from my clients is this: “I can’t seem to motivate the salespeople to call on prospects and develop them into new customers.”

There is a relatively simple, fun and cheap way to remedy this situation. It’s called a sales blitz. Unfortunately, few companies are even well aware of it, and fewer yet apply it.

Here’s the problem. Most business-to-business sales efforts are organized around a sales rep who is responsible for a particular set of accounts, or a particular geographic area. Commonly, that rep is expected to raise the business with the current customers as well as to identify and develop new customers. Clearly, most sales people are better at one part of this two-part responsibility than the other. Commonly, developing new customers takes second place in the salesperson’s priorities. Staying inside their comfort zones and centering on keeping the current customers happy becomes a higher priority on a every day basis. As a result, few new customers are developed, and sales management is continually frustrated with the company’s poor performance. Instead of continue beating a dead horse by trying to motivate the sales force to create new customers, one alternate approach is to apply a sales blitz.

What’s a sales blitz? It is an organized effort by the company to focus all of its sales force on a specific task in one specific territory. The most common task is to identify, qualify and engage potential new customers. But, a sales blitz could also be used to rapidly communicate some hot new product or service to a market.

A sales blitz has the advantage of centering the entire sales force on a specific task. That alone will contribute you far greater results than if you’d just left it to each salesperson to do on their own.

But there are some extra perquisites. For instance, the preparation for a sales blitz provides you an opportunity to thoroughly train the sales force in one acknowledgeable step in the sales process. Their competency thus improves. In addition, you can commonly measure their activities more specifically than normal. So, they become more competent and confident, and you more knowledgeable in the activities of your sales force.

Allow me illustrate with an example. Let’s say that you have group of eight salespeople who are each expected to build the business with current customers as well as create new ones. You are continually frustrated with their performance in producing new customers. Out of the group of eight people, you are fortunate to have one new customer a month. Since you are not satisfied with this, you decide to do a sales blitz for new customers.

So, you select one geographical area or market segment on which to focus. In this case, let’s say one of your salespeople has a relatively new territory, so you choose that territory as your focus. You decide that for a period of three days, you’re going to pull your whole sales force out of their territories and direct them into the new salesperson’s territory.

You bring them together, and explain the project. Their task is to identify, qualify and engage as many prospects as possible. The information gained and the doors opened in the process will then be provided to the territory rep, who will be expected to follow up and convert a significant number of these qualified prospects into customers.

You create a form for each salesperson. They must gather up the information specified on the form from each prospect. The information could include such basics as the name and title of the key contact person, some information about the account, and a sense of the opportunity for your company.

You then train the sales force in how to do just that one aspect of the sales process – make cold call, gather up some qualifying information, and fill in the form. You spend a day role-playing and practicing.

Next, you provide them with a list of current customers (off limits) and a list of potential customers. You break the group into four teams of two people each, and on the map, outline four different areas for each. You announce that at the end of each day, you will hold a brief meeting. At that meeting, you will tell success stories, share information and tactics that have worked for various team members, and count up the number of contacts made and forms completed by each team. The team with the most completed forms will be the day’s winner, and each member of the winning team will be awarded a gift certificate for dinner for him and his spouse.

At this point, you have organized the group’s efforts by identifying the specific job to be done, provided the instruments (forms and company literature), trained them in the task, focused them on a specific area, and added some structured time to learn and to be recognized.

On each day of the blitz, you stay in cell phone contact with each group, supporting them throughout the course of the day.

At the end of the three days, you will probably have gathered more prospects for your territory rep to follow up on than he/she would have done on his own in the course of a year or two.

Turn them over to the rep, keep a copy yourself, and watch the progress he/she makes in each account.

What have you achieved? A number of powerful things:

1. You have created more qualified leads for the territory rep in a few days than he/she would have created on his own in a few years.

2. You have created an entertaining experience for all your reps.

3. Each rep has learned some new skills as they focused on just one part of the sales process and repeated it over and over again. They will be better at creating new customers in their own territory as a result of this learning experience.

That’s a sales blitz.