How do I find time for prospecting?
When it comes to your sales pipeline, there’s just one thing you are in complete control over.
You can’t control when people buy or who will buy, but you have complete control over the top of your funnel.
And unless you’ve got something seriously wrong, the more qualified leads you put into the top of your funnel, the more sales come out the bottom.
So the equation is simple, generate more leads, and you’ll get more sales.
So why don’t we generate more leads?
A consistent lead generation process requires two things:
- A clear idea of who your ideal client is and where to find them.
- Consistent, daily effort to find and engage with those clients.
Most of my clients have the first part down pretty well. The consistent effort? That’s their downfall.
Make it happen a little every day.
I’ve found that when I plan a big prospecting push where I’m setting aside an afternoon to reach out to 100 new prospects is setting myself up for failure.
Those long blocks of time are hard to hold on my calendar. Prospecting is demanding work and I’m too easily distracted. My willpower to keep focused runs out too fast! Plus, if I miss one session, I’ve blown a week’s worth of prospecting!
Short sprints, 30 – 60 min per day, are easier for me to stick with and more likely to accomplish.
Set yourself up for success
To make it easier, prepare for success ahead of time.
Start each session with a list of qualified leads to work from. My assistant does some searching in LinkedIn every day to keep a list of leads in front of me. All that I need to do is write the outreach messages and engage with the replies.
I keep a script, or outline, on my monitor so that I’m not writing each message completely from scratch. I modify the script to make it unique to each prospect’s situation, but having the script makes it easier and faster.
I try to set a reasonable number of leads to reach out to each day, I recommend between 4 – 10. Once you’ve reached that goal, you’re done! I often feel like I’m in a groove and can go ahead and do one or two more.
If you do outreach to 5 people a day, that’s 25 a week; you’ll be having 5 prospect conversations a week at a 20% response rate! I’ll be that’s more conversations than you had in the last week.
Do you need to get better at outreach? Is building your business development pipeline one of your key goals for 2021?
I’ve just finished an online course to help you with that – I’m looking for 10 people to beta test it for me. If you’d like in, hit reply and let me know!
