Longer, More Often, and With Greater Value
"But I am prospecting..."
You think you are, but you really aren't.
Sure, you're going through the motions. You attempted to reach a few human beings, enough to say you did some work, but you have to ask yourself, did you really put any effort into it, or are you just going through the motions?
Most sales reps send a few emails, say they made some calls, and spend more time on LinkedIn than they should. And they call this prospecting.
It's really not much more than the plausible deniability of looking busy while at work.
Assuming your messaging is good (more on that in a minute), here are the two biggest reasons prospecting efforts fall short. The research is out there, and the data is clear:
Sellers don't reach out long enough
Sellers don't reach out often enough
Oddly, when I tell them to reach out more often and for longer durations, they look at me like snakes are coming out of my ears and say they're afraid they'll be considered pests.
But let's look at the facts. The numbers don't lie.
Regarding duration, most B2B reps stop reaching out after three attempts. The studies say it takes a little more than 9 to reach somebody for the first time. If you're not planning on ten before you give up, you're literally planning to fail.
Regarding frequency, why is the default still two weeks between those calls for most salespeople? Do you actually think your prospect needs more time to think about the boring message you left them? If you're not reaching out at least once a week, you're barely cutting through the noise, and you're definitely not gaining any momentum. Are you making ten sales calls or the same call ten times?
The "factory settings" of most sellers don't pass the say-it-out-loud test. You know it, and you can do better. The reason you don't reach out longer and more often isn't because you're not capable. It's because you don't believe enough in the value of what you sell to be more persistent.
I went into greater detail about this on the podcast this week. When you believe that you're worth talking to and that you have something worth talking about, you'll make the extra effort. But you probably weren't trained with the motives of your customer in mind. You probably don't realize the huge impact your solution makes on their businesses and their lives. You're probably looking at a much smaller picture than you should be.
With no connection to the bigger impact, how are you supposed to be inspired?
Here's what you need to do. Sit down with your best customers and have them talk about the real-world impacts of working with you. Record the conversations. Show those to the team.
Then, spend some time working as a team to develop better talk tracks and questions. Extended prospecting campaigns can't be treated as improv exercises. Since you've done the work to better understand your impact, you and your team are now capable of much better.
Jeffrey Gitomer used to say that most salespeople are not willing to do the hard work necessary to make the selling part easy. This is what that work looks like. If you don't want to do it, it's probably not because you're lazy. What's more likely is that what you're selling doesn't line up with your integrity. That's the bigger problem that needs to be fixed.
When you believe in what you do for others, it's so much easier to do the work necessary to provide it. Believe in what you sell, or sell something else.
