Too many salespeople look at prospecting as a solution.
In other words, a solution they only do when they don’t have enough in their pipeline, when all other attempts to sell have failed, or when it doesn’t look like they’re going to make their number.
It’s a solution when they’re absolutely desperate. That is the wrong attitude about prospecting.
Prospecting is an activity you have to do with repetition.
Repetition brings exposure.
Unless the prospect sees you enough, they’re not going to engage with you.
Oftentimes salespeople throw out a whole bunch of emails—hundreds and thousands of emails, get one or two bites, and then run with it and forget about all the others. They never come back to them.
Read these 10 Ground Rules for Prospecting with Email
Let’s say you’ve qualified your leads, you know they’re good leads, but they’re not engaging with you. You haven’t been repetitive enough in reaching out to them, whether that be phone call, email, text messaging, social media, or a combination thereof.
It takes time to see a difference.
Are you a person that exercises? Let’s say you go to the gym every day for a week or two, and you really don’t see any difference. You might start to feel a difference, but you really don’t see one.
It isn’t until you are routinely doing it day in and day out for a long period of time that you begin to see the results.
Similarly in prospecting, you want to be doing this as an activity, and that actually means fewer prospects than you realize— but it’s repetitive.
It’s over and over and over again, but never with the same message. Every message must be different.
More prospects won’t solve your problem.
When I work with salespeople and companies who are struggling with getting prospects, I always say, “Let’s take a look at the CRM system. Or, let’s look at your cadence. Let’s look at what you’ve been doing.”
And you know what? 95% of the time, it’s not there. They have not been reaching out. In the majority of these situations, they’ve had no repetition. You see, this is why I say prospecting is an activity.
This is also why I don’t think that you can prospect 500 people. At one time, I was working with some enterprise reps dealing with very large accounts, and each of them had 20 accounts, and they were thinking, “I need another 50, 75, 100 accounts.” No, you don’t. You have more than enough right there.
Now, if I’m SMB, that’s a different story because those are shorter sales cycles, smaller opportunities, et cetera.
Your solution to prospecting cannot be to just get a boatload more prospects. That’s a big fat mistake.
Breaking Goals Down into Small, Consistent Chunks
+making your goals more manageable and more powerful.
Find Ep. 171 on The Sales Hunter Podcast now.
Making Your Solutions Essential for Every Stakeholder
w/ Julie Thomas
+How to connect the problem you’ve identified to real business issues that make it worthwhile to solve and to change
+The overlooked aspect of customer inaction and strategies to effectively communicate the cost of inaction (COI).
Episode drops WEDNESDAY, 1/24/2024!!
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Copyright 2024, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of A Mind for Sales and High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results.
