Sales is a profession filled with clichés. From movies like The Wolf of Wall Street to Glengarry Glen Ross, most people think we’re money-thirsty, always grinding, sharks.
Sales, and prospecting in particular, is not about hard work.
It’s about consistency. About showing up every day and tackling repetitive, boring tasks.
It’s like a gym workout. If you work out for a week and stop, you’ll get no results. If you show up every day for months, you’ll create a habit, and you’ll see compounding results over time.
In today’s newsletter, I’m going to show you how to build that prospecting routine.
Let’s dive in.
Prospecting without knowing how many people to contact daily is a recipe for failure.
There’s a simple way to fix that. Start by figuring out what’s your target. Maybe you need to book a certain amount of meeting, or your need to generate opportunities. Then, get a rough estimate of your meeting rate and reply rate.
You’ll be able to convert your target into a number of prospects you need to contact. Just divide this by the number of days you’ll be working in that period and you have your daily activity.
You can use my Sales Process Calculator to do what I did above.
Rituals are incredibly important in sales. We have weekly sales meetings, offsites, sales kickoffs, and president clubs.
But the most important ritual is often forgotten: a prospecting block. Block 30-60 minutes every day at the same time. You can add as many prospecting blocks as you want, based on the effort you need to reach your cruising altitude.
Most reps do not protect their times and end up dragged into useless meetings (often from their bosses). They end up with no pipeline, they prospect like crazy for a few days, only to finish burnt out.
Here’s how my prospecting schedule looks like:
Most replies come from following up.
Prospects are busy. They often receive outreach messages or calls while they’re in meetings. If you don’t follow up, you’ll end up missing most of your opportunities to book meetings.
Instead, make sure you have a system to track your follow-ups. Here’s how mine looks like:
Interested in my prospecting tracker it? You can get it here.
Spending days building a lead list is a great way to miss to your targets.
If you need 200 new prospects per week to reach your cruising altitude, you may spend a whole day to find these leads and create your lead list. You can also break this into 5 blocks and spend 2 hours finding 40 leads, then 2 hours contacting them.
Contacting new prospects every day is like refuelling a car. If you run out of leads, your outbound engine will stop working.
Good things take time. Building a solid outreach system is a good thing, and it requires patience.
Instead of worrying about not seeing immediate results, stick to your process and give it a few weeks. A great thing about prospecting is that you don’t need to be incredibly talented or smart to get results. Start by setting a high input (add 20% to your cruising altitude) and see what comes out of it.
After a few weeks, tweak your sequence and messaging to see if your reply rate increases. Once you fixed your reply rate, tweak your conversations to increase your meeting rate.
It’s that simple.
Build your prospecting routine like your would build a new habit. Over time, you can add fancy tools and tactics.
When getting started?
Keep it simple.
TL;DR:
1. Define your input.
2. Protect your schedule.
3. Execute on your follow-ups.
4. Find enough new prospects daily.
5. Enjoy the journey, tweak after a few weeks.
Cheers,
Thibaut
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