Ep. 31: The Power of Prospecting

The only way to grow your business is by acquiring new business, and how can you acquire these customers? Prospecting.

In this episode of Stay Paid, Josh and Luke discuss the necessity of prospecting for all salespeople, including where to start in your prospecting journey and the strategies you should be implementing to turn your prospects into valuable customers.

Key Points

  • Prospecting is a necessary evil for all businesses
  • Develop a prospecting playbook to keep yourself on track
  • Setting up touchpoints can help you turn prospects into clients

Prospect every day.

The key to growing any business begins and ends with prospecting. If you’re looking to stay paid, there is no other tactic nearly as important. But prospecting is also one of the most dreaded tasks among business owners.

Like a prospector going after gold, you sometimes have to dig and dig to find that small piece of value. Though, when you do, it’s all worth it. Ideally, two to three hours of your day should be spent prospecting, which may seem like a lot of time for many business owners, especially for those who are handling the job on their own.

However, it’s important to consider that, for every person you email, call text, what have you, it is a very small percentage of that group who will actually turn into a viable prospect that shows clear and urgent interest in your product or service. From there, it’s an even smaller portion who you will be able to secure for a follow-up appointment, and an even smaller subset of prospects who will eventually turn into clients.

Prospecting is, undoubtedly a grind, but it’s a numbers game that is guaranteed to work in your favor should you put in the effort.

Where should I begin?

Before you start prospecting it’s important to develop a playbook of sorts to help you evaluate exactly how many people you need to be contacting per day, and what type of success those calls will yield for your business.

Take the prospecting we do at ReminderMedia, for example. Our playbook dictates that, of the 150–200 cold calls we make per day, 100–200 will go straight to voicemail. Of the 50 prospects remaining, just 20–35 will pick up the phone, and our sales callers will be able to pitch to just 9. From those 9 pitches, we can expect to close between 2 and 3.

Once you’ve developed your playbook and a solid prospecting strategy, you will likely need to dedicate yourself to pushing this strategy for at least a month in order to see results. For many businesses, a CRM or a dialer can help speed up the process and alleviate some of the tediousness of prospecting.

It sometimes feels like a tremendous effort for such a small return, but there is also immense opportunity for you to nurture seemingly uninterested prospects into clients through strategic campaigns.

Build your pipeline to build confidence.

The eventual point of prospecting is to build up your pipeline. With a full pipeline, you can feel more comfortable and confident in your business and won’t need to stress about every single sale because you know that there are plenty of other prospects waiting.

For those prospects who do make it into your funnel, it will be absolutely imperative to follow-up through various touchpoints—the number of which may vary, but should be, at minimum, 6–12.

You can reach clients through emails, phone calls, text messages, or even through social media, which has become an increasingly popular method of communicating to potential clients. The power of social media is like power of email marketing ten years ago—it should be a critical piece of your prospecting strategy.

Ultimately, you won’t know what works for you and your business until you try. So, write down a strategy, test it out, revise it, and test it again. Work your prospecting approach until you’ve found the exact formula that brings results.

Action Items

Following this podcast, our goal is to provide you with as many actionable tips as possible. This episode includes…

  • Develop your own playbook to start seeing a greater return on your prospecting efforts
  • Download our lead calculator to formulate your prospecting success ratio

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