We’re all guilty of over thinking. There’s no need to over complicate prospecting. Time and time again, I have found that simple works. Best of all, simple can also be the fastest way to accomplish a goal. Succeeding in prospecting is a goal you need to achieve.
Below are 5 steps to simplify your process:
1. Know who your perfect prospect is. Then, create an avatar of that person. Look at your current customers to find this. What outcomes have you helped them achieve? How did they benefit from you? What characteristics do they share- such as industry, job function, geography, customer base, etc.? The more robust you can make your avatar, the better. As you go through this process, you may find they’re in two or three different industries, or have two or three titles. Don’t be alarmed! Create multiple avatars. It’s ok to have 2 – 4 avatars, just don’t get carried away and create more than four.
2. Use the internet for your avatar, your existing customer base, etc. in order to find others that match your perfect avatar at least 75%. Be cautious about dropping the number below 75%, because if you do so, you’ll wind up with too much variance among your prospects and wind up wasting a lot of time. The more your prospects mirror your avatar, the better off you will be.
3. Use every communication method possible to reach your prospect. Just because you like email doesn’t mean your prospect will. You have to use every communication method possible to see what works. Don’t hold back- time is working against you. Too many salespeople think they will spread these out over many months, but you can’t afford to wait. You have to eat! If you don’t close sales, you don’t eat – that’s a pretty simple concept!
4. Work your cadence, and don’t stop! This is where too many salespeople fall down. Often, people reach out to a prospect a few times and then when they don’t get a response, they stop. The cadence you use will vary based on what you sell, who you sell to and how what you sell is used, but here’s my simple formula: take whatever cadence you had been using and double it. This means if you’ve been trying to reach a prospect 8 times before giving up, now you’ll need to try 16 times. If this means you were trying to reach them once every two weeks, now try once every week. The key is making sure each message you send is different and valuable to the prospect. They don’t care who you are. If they really need to know, they’ll just Google you and your company. To engage them initially, it must be 100% for them. This step is important, like critically important. If you fail to follow through on your cadence, everything else you did was a waste of time. Follow-through must be your word of the day, and not just today but everyday.
5. Set your expectations accordingly. Remember when you’re prospecting, people aren’t expecting to hear from you. They’re not waking up in the morning hoping you interrupt their day. Accept the fact that you’ll always be an interruption, but don’t forget why you’re doing what you’re doing. You’re interrupting them because you can help them, and you know this because they closely align with your perfect customer avatar. To set your expectations low means your simply striving to move the process forward. This might look like securing a time for the next call or getting them to share a piece of information with you. Regardless of what it is, you’re required to have a clear call to action in the form of a next step. It’s your goal to achieve that next step, not to create world peace or cure cancer – it’s merely to move the process forward.
That’s it! Those are my 5 steps to simplify how you prospect. It’s not as hard as people want to make it out to be. Yes, these are the five steps, but maybe I should have given you a sixth one. The sixth one is start! Don’t think about prospecting, don’t lament over the process, don’t waste time stressing over it. Start at the top of this blog, read the five and go! Do not stop, just go! Thinking about prospecting is not prospecting. Prospecting is when you are in conversation with a prospect, whether that be via text, email, telephone, etc.
You’ll never have more deals to close than you prospect. That’s a no-brainer statement, but it gets lost in translation with too many salespeople. If you want to learn more, subscribe to The Sales Hunter YouTube channel, and buy my book, High-Profit Prospecting.
Get ready for my next book, A Mind For Sales comes out in March. Trust me when I say this book will change your perspective on sales, because it will change your perspective on how you think. Grab your copy today.
Copyright 2020, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Result
