Suspend Your Disbelief: Sales Prospecting Tips

Jim Rohn once said that you shouldn’t wish things were more straightforward; you should wish that you were better. This goes doubly for sales prospecting. Sales prospecting is hard work that requires planning, aggressive activity, time management, and a goal-focused mindset. Unfortunately, in today’s saturated market, sales leaders must think outside the box to succeed.

Old-school Sales Prospecting Ideas

In our world of social media, we’re always connected and never truly connecting. Sometimes, the best sales prospecting tips require you to ditch modern technology and get back to what sales prospecting is about: establishing a human connection. 

Marketers today rely too heavily on waiting for prospects to initiate an outreach to our businesses. This is an easy way to avoid outbound personal prospecting. It’s effortless to send a batch of emails to prospects, so the onus is on them to respond. However, you’re not likely to make much of an impression that way. 

In his book Fanatical Prospecting, business leader Jeb Blount proposes a radical idea in this day and age: returning to the art of the phone call. He believes we must aggressively “interrupt” our prospects with outbound telephone calls to get on their radar. If you only rely on single-dimension sales strategies, you won’t see the results you want. 

When done right, these phone calls can make a great impression on your sales prospects. You can show your understanding of their needs and give them a voice to attach to your name. It’s much easier to convince someone to say “yes” on the phone than by email, which is one of the best sales prospecting tips in the business.

How can I improve my sales prospecting?

It’s not enough to make these phone calls and hope for the best—you must strategize. Here are four sales prospecting tips to help you achieve results.

1. Successful prospecting requires severe discipline, especially regarding your schedule. Blount talks about blocking off hours early in the day to stay focused entirely on making calls interrupting prospects. He refers to these as the Golden Hours. It would help to maximize this time and not be distracted by anything but calling.
2. Superior sales performance is built upon quality projections. If you don’t take the time to plan your sales activities, you can’t win. You need to use data to determine how many calls you must make to deliver your projections reasonably. Too often, we spitball our numbers instead of using the data to justify and drive our activity.
3. Procrastination, perfectionism, and paralysis are limiting mindsets. It’s easy to put off making calls out of fear of rejection. We try to over-study, over-prepare, and delay getting it right. In this case, done is better than perfect. Put your worries aside and make the call.
4. Remember the purpose of prospecting. One of the most effective sales prospecting tips I can give is to do only a little in that initial phone call. Outbound sales calling is solely about setting up meeting appointments. Relationship building is essential, but it should come later.

Many need to remember the art of old-school sales prospecting. If you’d like to improve your sales prospecting skills, please fill out my contact form, and we can schedule a free video call to discuss your strategies and process. 

Coach Dave