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How to Make Sales Prospecting a Daily Activity

Sales prospecting can be a grind.

But to be successful, there’s no way around making sales prospecting a daily activity. Consistency is key to sales growth.

The good news is that you can use technology to help you make the best use of your time. The flip side is that relying too much on technology may hamper your efforts.

Remember, sales prospecting is connecting with potential customers with whom you’ve never done business. To be successful, need to balance your need to retain existing customers while prospecting for new ones.

Here are some helpful suggestions from QORVAL you can pass to your sales team. If you have successful sales associates, it’s likely they already incorporate these strategies every day. So, encourage them to share their experience with less-motivated colleagues based on these ideas.

Set daily goals

Begin by determining what your long-term sales goals are by quarter and annually, counsels Gregg Schwartz, a sales and marketing expert in an article for SCORE, a nonprofit organization of retired executives who help small businesses grow.

Once you know your quarterly or annual sales goals, you can work backwards and figure out what your daily goals should be to achieve them. You can calculate how many sales calls you need to make each day based on your success rate.

You can read an illustration of how to make these calculations by reading Schwartz’ article here.

Manage your leads

It’s important to track your progress. That’s where having customer-relationship management software becomes essential.

A good customer-relationship management program incorporates your lead list with a calendar that alerts you daily to follow up with prospects. As you know, it often takes repeated calls, emails and letters to close a sale and forgetting to do that is a sure way to fall behind.

Technology can also help you get motivated. Sales is a contact sport and these daily reminders from your software will remind you to make those calls.

Real estate pro Nico Hohman published a post that delves into more detail about this aspect of sales in the National Association of Realtors YPN Lounge, a website for young real estate professionals. You can read it here.

Mind your language

It’s helpful to create and refine scripts before you start prospecting.

You write and rehearse scripts in advance to figure the best language to use with a prospect, not to read it like a robot, says sales expert Anthony Iannarino.

If you are new to sales, creating scripts will help you stay on point and ensure that your message is clear. Rehearsal is important so you’re not winging it, Iannarino counsels.

You can read more about using scripts to help your prospecting on Iannarino’s blog here.

Make the time

Setting a specific time each day to prospect can help provide the discipline for the task, says Amy McCloskey Tobin in a post on SAP Digital.

Tobin counsels that the best sales people embrace prospecting because they realize it’s a must-do item every day. Set aside 30 minutes each day and guard that time like your life depends on it.

You can read her blog, The Truth About Sales Prospecting, here.

Qorval’s experts have decades of experience assisting firms in a broad range of industries in all aspects of improving the P&L, the efficiency of operations, and sound business development and other organizational strategies for growth, scale, turnaround/improvement, and exit.