#39
Performance Driven Selling©
Planting Seeds and Cultivating the Target Rich Environment (TRE™) in Your Market Orchard!
By: Dr. Jeff Magee, PDM, CSP, CMC

Great sales professionals understand that taking care of their primary market is critical to selling success. Along with this activity, there also is a need to be continually cultivating new future business.

Just as the 80/20 Rule (see mini-seminar 15 for review) does apply for selling – a larger percentage (80’ish percent) of ones’ business matriculates from a smaller portion of the contact base they maintain (20’ish percent). Coach your sales team to recognize the market or areas from which they tend to do the majority of their work and receive the majority of their business from is known as ones’ “Target Rich Environment (TRE)”.

While sales professionals are actively taking care of the primary TRE, there is always a need to be planting seeds of contact for future orders or the harvesting of seeds through successful harvests.

To determine where the best future markets may be a sales professional should start by analyzing the core product or services offered and seek to determine where there might be additional viable markets to cultivate.

Example: If a sales professional has a product or service that they tend to matriculate more business from high school age students and their primary TRE would be a physical high school complex, then additional TRE’s could be identified by determining where else one could attain high school age names for contact.

So, the seeds of other or new TREs that the sales professional would concentrate energies on daily as well would be:

1. Shopping Malls
2. Sports Complexes/Gyms
3. Church Youth Groups
4. Sports Teams/Coaches
5. YMCA
6. Boys and Girls Clubs
7. Honor Roll Listings in Local Newspapers
8. Yearbook Listings
9. Driver’s License Register Rolls
10. City/County Unemployment Offices
11. Etc.

By identifying the product/services that a sales professional has to offer and the related customer that most typically buys, a sales professional must also be working to identify other new sources of buyers for their offerings. An easy way to accomplish this is to look for all other viable markets for your product/service and start becoming known within it.

You can do this by looking at business buying patterns within your own industry, by looking at where your colleagues tend to do more of their business or by identifying all potential buyers in the same industry you sell the most into presently (horizontally). A sales professional can also identify potential lucrative markets by reviewing the actual product/service and exploring who in other markets or other TRE’s could be receptive to your offering.

Activity 39-A
Identifying Your “Target Rich Environment” (TRE):
Market Saturation of Your Primary TRE In Your Sales Orchard!

Take a stack of index cards and write down the top ten customers that you have, one response per card, reflective of the clients you have at the bottom of your “Sales Funnel”. Then review the names that you have written down to determine if there is a pattern of more clients having anything in common – identify a possible TRE.

Activity 39-B
Identifying Your “Target Rich Environment” (TRE):
Market Saturation of Your Primary TRE In Your Sales Orchard!

Now, pair off with a colleague, take your stack of index cards and from your identified TRE, brainstorm together other TREs from your combined active clients that you can be matriculating business from. See how many different TREs you can come up with.