Colleen’s Blog

You’ve been increasing your prospecting efforts and as a result, orders and sales are beginning to flood in. Your hard work is beginning to pay off and you’ll never have to spend time prospecting again...right? Wrong! Too many salespeople become complacent after a successful period of prospecting. They begin to slow down with their prospecting activities because they’re too busy celebrating current victories instead of focusing on securing future achievements. In short, they forget all about the hard work that allowed them to achieve success in the first place. Don’t get caught in this trap!

If you’re doing research about your industry, your market and your competition...well done! Successful salespeople always make moves based on facts, not assumptions. However, if you’re not tracking yourself on a regular basis, you may be omitting your most important pieces of data. ← Click To Tweet When it comes to prospecting, it’s important to set a goal. But, you must also track your progress towards achieving that goal. If you’re not collecting your own prospecting data, you risk falling behind and reaching a point in the year where you can no longer recover for lost time. That's why I strongly suggest measuring the success of your prospecting activities each month. The objective is to ensure that your efforts add enough prospects to the top end of your sales funnels so you can achieve your sales goals. After reviewing your progress, take one of the two following steps:

Just like many other things in life, keep the word variety in mind when it comes to your sales if you want see greater results. If you’re only using one or two pipeline streams to create more success with your prospecting, you are likely either currently experiencing or will experience less than impressive sales results. Why? Because the goal of efficient salespeople is to fill their sales funnels with the right prospects using multiple pipeline streams. In today’s market, your buyers have access to information anywhere, anytime and on any form of media they desire. In fact, they are often gathering information about you in places you would rather they avoid, especially if you have little to no presence in those spaces. Therefore, you must be ubiquitous! It’s critical that you retain control of all pieces of information about you and your business by embracing all forms of prospecting tools and media. You need to continue using the traditional and direct prospecting tools that you’re used to but you must also begin using indirect tools such as social media and publishing to your advantage. By doing so, you also expand your presence in the market.

Your success is created by small daily efforts. While you likely won’t make or break your success on any given day, a series of successful days will result in positive sales results in the long run and a series of unsuccessful days will likely result in less than pleasing results. Therefore, it’s essential that you show up to work each day with a sense of purpose. Dedicate time at the start of your work day to make prospecting calls. To ensure that you maximize your chances for success, here are 8 steps you can take to increase your productivity and your results when making your calls: