The most successful salespeople are always challenging and adapting their personal sales process to be more effective, but they don’t challenge the notion of the importance of making prospecting their A priority every week.
They know that no matter how successful they are, if they don’t continue to add new relationships, that eventually, their business will decline.
As we think about all of the things as sales professionals we're supposed to do, it really comes down to three things to get paid:
I want to focus on the first thing we get paid to do and that's to find opportunities. There are many ways we can find opportunities; cold calls, drop in’s, direct marketing, social selling (LinkedIn and Twitter), getting introductions, etc.
Although there are many ways we can prospect, some provide a higher return on the biggest investment we can make, and that’s our time. In a previous blog, I tried to debunk the “time management” problem. It isn’t a time management problem, it’s a priority management problem.
As we focus on prospecting, the least return on our investment is cold calling. For all the time you invest in cold calling, the actual return (speaking to a decision maker) is extremely low. We know it’s a necessary evil, but not a permanent problem. On the other hand, it is a proven fact, the highest return on our prospecting timeis in getting introductions.
So here is what I would like you to consider:
This is just a rough outline on what you can do but the big takeaways are this:
Someone needs what you do, so go find them and start prospecting today to find more of them!
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