Quit blaming salespeople for bad prospecting habits when you as the sales manager are the one with the bad prospecting habits! Culture starts at the top. If you want your team to focus on prospecting, you must make it a priority.
Your role as a sales manager/leader is not to be the best prospecting person. Your job is to coach and support the job of your people when it comes to prospecting. Each time you change your sale’s team focus to resolving petty issues with existing accounts rather than prospecting, you’re defeating yourself.
Check my video on this same subject:
Prospecting is not something you wake up in the morning excited about doing. I’m sure there are a few people eager to, but don’t kid yourself into thinking you’ve hired all of them! Too many companies are missing on their plan because of a failure to properly prospect.
Here are four quick things you as a sales manager can do each day to prospect correctly:
1. Ensure each salesperson has a dedicated block of time to only prospect. Honor this time by making sure they won’t be distracted by having to take care of other things.
2. Check the goal and results each person achieves during their dedicated prospecting period. The best thing you can do it help hold your people accountable.
3. When each person finishes prospecting, ask them what they learned and how they can use it to improve their prospecting skills. This goes a long way in helping create a learning culture. Ultimately, your goal is to ensure each salesperson can also coach themselves.
4. Ask each person what their prospecting objective is for the next day. As I say often: “tomorrow begins today.” It is imperative that your people know what their plan is, including who they call and the objective for each one. Doing this will keep them from using their prospecting time to prepare but not actually do it.
If every sales manager does these four things each day, it’s amazing how much more prospecting their team will accomplish. Creating a prospecting culture begins with doing and living out these four items each day.
Don’t forget to watch my video out on this same subject! By the way, if you have not picked up a copy of my book, High-Profit Prospecting, go grab one. While you’re at it, buy multiple copies for each member of your team.
Copyright 2019, 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 Results
