Prospecting is not decided by a new idea but by regularity. Calling, obtaining meetings, travelling, qualifying, following up and recording: those gestures repeated every week produce a flow of business. This page describes how that routine is organised in practical terms inside a Swiss SME.
A campaign run over three weeks produces a spike of activity followed by a gap of several months. The flow of business follows the regularity of the work rather than its occasional intensity. In practice that means fixed slots in the week, protected like a customer appointment, with a contact target set in advance. Two half-days held every week for a year achieve more than three intense weeks run twice a year and followed by complete silence.
An improvised call almost always ends in a polite refusal. Five minutes of preparation is enough: what the company does, its approximate size, the function to reach, a hypothesis about the need and a plausible reason for calling now. That last point is decisive; without it the person has no reason to give time to a stranger. The information comes from the company website, the trade press, a shared customer or an earlier visit noted in the file.
The objective of the call is the meeting, not the sale. The telephone remains effective in Swiss B2B provided the conversation is short and precise. Email works mainly as confirmation or follow-up; used alone its yield stays low. Calling by without an appointment retains its use in certain field trades, particularly when a site is hard to reach otherwise. Combining these means on the same account works better than expecting a result from any one of them alone.
A badly built field day dissolves into travel time. The practical rule is to group visits by area and build each tour around two or three target accounts, completed by follow-up visits in the same region. A cancelled meeting must be replaceable on the spot. In Switzerland distances are short, but terrain, traffic and the access hours of industrial sites demand realistic planning rather than an optimistic line drawn on a map.
A first meeting is for understanding, not for running through a catalogue. Four points are enough: what the real application looks like, who decides and who influences, who the current supplier is and what could justify a change, and over what timeframe. A poorly qualified opportunity clogs the pipeline for months and distorts every forecast. Closing the meeting with a dated next step, however small, turns a pleasant conversation into a deal that is actually followed.
Most B2B deals close after several contacts, and many salespeople stop before that point. A written cadence — follow-up on fixed dates, alternating channels, content that contributes something — avoids both forgetting and pestering. A clear refusal is good news: it frees time. Prolonged silence costs more; it is better to ask a closed question that allows the file to be classified than to let it drift indefinitely inside the pipeline.
A contact that is not recorded does not exist for the company. The discipline required is minimal but not negotiable: date, contact, useful content, next step. Without it, follow-up depends on one person's memory and disappears with them. The tool matters little; what matters is that entry takes under a minute and happens the same day. A CRM filled in at month end tells a reconstructed story rather than what happened in the field.
In Swiss B2B, inbound enquiries come from identifiable sources: customer referrals, trade fairs, sector associations, online visibility, reactivated former contacts. Each produces limited volume but better-disposed contacts than a cold call. The useful question is not which channel is best in theory, but which one actually produced orders over the last two years. That information sits in your order data, provided the origin of the contact was recorded at the time.
Swiss Sales Partners works within an agreed prospecting scope: target accounts, contact rhythm, tour organisation and reporting. The approach draws on more than 30 years of B2B sales, field sales, commercial management and sales-management experience, in the environments of Hilti, Egli Fischer (efco), Berner and Bouygues. No number of appointments is guaranteed in advance. What is committed is the regularity of the activity and the traceability of every contact made.
Yes, provided the call is short, prepared and aimed at the meeting rather than the sale. Its yield remains higher than an email sent alone with no prior contact.
There is no universal number. What matters is a written cadence and a classification rule: a clear refusal frees time, and prolonged silence is settled with a closed question.
It helps when internal selling time is absorbed by the installed base. Outsourcing removes neither the need to define target accounts nor the duty to handle the meetings obtained.
Two fixed half-days per week, sustained over time, produce more than intense periods followed by several months with no conquest activity at all.
It depends on the sector and above all on the follow-up. A fair without a follow-up plan within ten days produces business cards and rarely deals that genuinely start.
Prospecting is not decided by a new idea but by regularity. Calling, obtaining meetings, travelling, qualifying, following up and recording: those gestures repeated every week produce a flow of business. This page describes how that routine is organised in practical terms inside a Swiss SME.