During my three decades in the sales industry I’ve worked with, met, coached, and observed thousands of sellers from a multitude of industries. They’ve been new and experienced, inside and outside sellers, big ticket and small, specialized products and services as well as common, commodity products, some very successful and a great many barely holding their own or failing.
Some have been hail fellow well met types, others have been shy introverts. Some pound the phones, others pound the pavement. Some are highly attuned to technology, others can barely turn their cell phone on. Some like to hit the office or the road early, others prefer to work late, a few do both.
But with rare exceptions they all have one thing in common—they’re busy.
They’re all doing stuff.
And a great deal of the time when you ask them what they’re doing they tell you they’re prospecting.
They’re busy trying to find business. They’re focused on getting a contract in the door and getting paid.
Some, not the majority by any means, are very successful. Most are not.
So the natural question is what’s the difference? Why are a few really good at finding prospects and brining in business and most aren’t?
Turns out that most of the time the answer is really pretty simple.
The successful sellers spend their time prospecting.
The majority are simply infected with the disease of “prospecting,” that is, the illusion that what they are doing is prospecting when in reality it is nothing more than busy work to keep them from having to do the tough work of actually prospecting.
These unsuccessful sellers can show lists of several hundred names and phone numbers they have spent hours and hours researching that they have on a call list—a few dozen will have check marks beside them, even fewer will be scratched through. They can show stacks of fliers and letters they have mailed out. They can produce a list of networking events they have attended over the past couple of months. They can produce a passel of emails they have sent out. They may even have their business card pinned to every corkboard in every restaurant, laundromat, and other business that has a board to display customer’s cards.
Certainly they’ve been busy; no doubt about that. The problem is although they have been busy, they haven’t been prospecting. Instead of prospecting, they’ve been “prospecting”—creating filers, writing letters and emails, attending non-qualified networking events, making a phone call here and there—and increasingly spending more and more time “connecting’ with prospects via social media, tweeting and updating their facebook page and searching LinkedIn for any warm body that might be a prospect to try to connect with. They confuse preparatory and busy work for prospecting, with the actual activity of interacting with a qualified prospect.
Although they spend a great deal of time doing busy work, they spend very little time actually prospecting. They “feel” they are always prospecting, but in reality they are always finding ways not to prospect by spending their time preparing to prospect. They engage in a great deal of activity, but the activity isn’t the activity that will produce business; instead, it is the activity that makes them feel good, feel productive, allowing them to convince themselves that they are being extremely active.
We salespeople tend to focus on activity—after all, activity is what gets us in the door, gets us the business we must have in order to succeed. But activity alone is fruitless. Activity for activity’s sake is just as sure a way to failure as inactivity.
Prospecting isn’t preparation to prospect; it isn’t finding easy ways to feel like you’re getting your message out; and it isn’t simply being busy all of the time. Prospecting is a very specific activity—connecting and interacting with qualified prospects.
If you cold call, that means being on the phone, not getting ready to get on the phone. If you network, it means actually being in front of and meeting prospects or garnering introductions to prospects from referral partners, not researching events or even spending time at non-qualified events where you’ll meet few, if any, prospects, or spending your time at the event hanging with friends and co-workers.
Investing time and energy in the wrong activities has killed as many sales careers as inactivity has.
As salespeople we have three very basic duties—finding and connecting with quality prospects, working with those prospects to help them satisfy needs or wants, and insuring that they are taken care of during and after the sale.
Everything else is busy work and busy work doesn’t make a sale, doesn’t generate income, and doesn’t move us toward our sales or income goals.
Before you engage in any activity consider whether that activity is income producing or not. If it isn’t directly producing income, does it really need to be done? If not, move on to an activity that will directly lead to a sale.
To succeed you need to spend your time prospecting. Getting infected with the “prospecting” disease where you “feel” you’re prospecting but in reality are finding ways to keep from having to prospect is a career killer.
