Prospecting? Give Up the Improv Act
Salespeople give up on their prospecting efforts entirely too quickly. Studies suggest it takes upwards of 18 attempts to simply get the attention of your prospect. What do most sales people do? They reach out twice, give up, and move on to the next one only to reach out twice, give up, and so on.
Pay close attention to that statement. Maybe go back and read it again. What do you see? I see a bunch of sellers convinced that the game is over when in actuality they haven’t even gotten their warm-ups off yet to start playing.
Why the disparity?
Your perspective is way off
You likely believe a superstition that if you say the right thing to the right person at the right time, they will give you a meeting and maybe even buy from you. That’s just not the case as often as you’d like to believe. The fact of the matter is, selling is a game of attrition that requires a lot of persistence.
How often have you been interrupted in the middle of something and been able to give that interruption your full attention? How often are you able to give it any of your attention? Probably not very often.
Let’s say then that you’re interrupted a second time. maybe a couple of weeks later. Is there any context now to give this interruption more of your attention? Probably not.
Does this situation compel you to return either one of those phone calls or emails and strike up a proactive conversation about doing business with someone? EVEN IF you have an awareness of that person or that company and they have a very strong reputation with you? Probably not. If the need isn’t quite urgent enough, you’re probably going to wait the caller out.
“Let’s see who we’re dealing with here. If it’s really important they’ll keep calling.” You’ve said it. So have I. More often than not, they don’t.
Still, for whatever reason, you believe that two outreach attempts is enough to generate sufficient interest to meet with you. I’m also not even going to discuss what those attempts look like, and how poorly worded and structured they are likely to be. We’re not talking about selling skills right now, we’re only talking about expectations.
You can’t think that hard, that quickly, for that long
There is a novelty to picking up the phone and calling someone for the first time. That novelty lasts for a little bit, but then starts to erode rather quickly. When it’s fresh, you’re engaged, and you feel like you’re on top of your game. After a while though, it starts to feel like work: work you’re not prepared to do.
You feel pretty comfortable winging it for a couple of calls. Voicemail messages are too difficult to leave, and even if you repeated yourself verbatim on each one, they probably needed to hear that statement twice anyway, right? Even the strongest sales person knows that they can’t get away with that 18 times in a row.
You now have two choices:
1) you can go to the drawing board, think hard about what those next 16 provocative questions or thoughts should be, or
2) you can just move on to somebody else.
You should do one of those things. You probably do the other.
This is where reality flies in the face of that superstition I mentioned earlier. You don’t just magically think of the right thing to say to the right person at the right time. You sit down with a pen and paper and you think about all the things you could possibly say in a prospecting situation. Did you create a list of options for yourself that far exceeds the number of attempts you hope it will take to get someone’s attention? Instead of thinking in the moment every time you reach out, go to the menu that you worked so hard to draft upfront.
The dirty little secret that most people don’t tell you about improv is that it works because of the amount of preparation put in by the performers. Of course it’s not scripted, and most of those lines have never been delivered before, but very little of what you see is actually invented in real time.
Do the hard work ahead of time
"The will to win is nothing without the will to prepare to win." Vince Lombardi
If what I’ve described thus far it sounds a little too familiar, and I’m going to make a counter intuitive suggestion. Put down the phone, and step away from your computer.
Instead, grab a pen, a pad of paper, and three or four of your colleagues on the sales team. Sit down for the next hour and brainstorm some provocative thoughts and questions that may help you start conversations with your prospects.
You should come up with 15 to 20 different conversation starters that hopefully tie back to your differentiators in the way you solve their most commonly occurring problems.
Repeat this exercise for each one of your ideal client profiles.
This is where you might be tempted to automate the entire process. I’m going to warn you that you would be doing yourself a disservice if you did that, at least upfront. You need to test these questions, these ideas, and to do so in real time. There is too much to be learned by the exchanges that are working or not for you to simply automate these and forget them.
"Most sales people are not willing to do the hard work upfront that makes the selling part easier." Jeffrey Gitomer
Try them. Learn them. Massage them. Transform them into the ones that will work. Now, not only do you have some effective conversation starters, you have enough of them to be persistent enough to send the message to your prospects that you are a consummate professional who knows they have a worthwhile solution, and you will not be waited out.
Then, if you must, you can enter them as a cadence in your sales engagement software. It’s just that this removes your finger from the pulse of your prospects. That’s always a dangerous proposition (and a topic for another piece).
The work you’ve been avoiding is exactly the work you need to do. The sooner you stop looking for a shortcut, the better you’ll notice your results will be.
Want a little more guidance? I’m doing some live training on this topic Wednesday afternoon. I hope to see you there.
You’re also welcome to join our conversations about sales prospecting in the Rethink The Way You Sell Community.
Jeff Bajorek
Real. Authentic. Experience.
There’s a big difference between knowing how to sell and being able to. Jeff Bajorek spent over a decade in the field as a top performer. He’s been in your shoes. He knows what it will take. He can help you succeed.
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