Prospecting Easy Gets Harder Every Day

The sales prospecting eternal search.
The quick fix that will generate more qualified opportunities fast.
The one thing that will make the difference.
The new wonder strategy that changes it all.

If only the right thing was found, generating qualified leads and opportunities would be so easy.

Here is reality. Prospecting the easy way is really hard and getting harder.

You need sales leads now but we can’t fix your failure to start three months ago

Your extreme need for sales results now is actually crippling your ability to generate leads.
Emphasis on seeking strategies that promise sales prospecting results overnight is what keeps many from achieving success.

Focusing on avoiding short term pain actually inhibits salespeople capable of much more from realizing their potential. When you desperately need to pay the rent, get by the next review or arguably meet a reporting benchmark, you start to contort what you do to avoid short-term pain. You should be focusing on things that will generate long term success.

When you are short term oriented you are working on low-probability land. Ya, you just barely paid the rent. And yes, you slid by the review without getting fired and there was enough vapor on your latest activity report to keep you from getting called out, but things never improve. You are always just getting by.

Step off the sales treadmill for a moment and ask yourself a question?
Over the last 3 years, has my income steadily increased or have I just been treading water?

If you haven’t been moving the needle, despite all your efforts and hard work, then your judgment about how to make more sales has been off course. Simple truth. The core driver of that truth is typically a short term focus and the search for easy quick methods to prospect for sales.

So, if for three years you have been lurching from one new hot strategy or shiny tactic to another, then abandoning those methods after a short period, why not just stop and do things right?

If you started doing the right things 3 months ago, today you would be noticing the sales difference. More prospects, better prospects, higher closing rates and more margin.

Wrap your head around this. Trying to find prospecting methods that are quick and easy and give you a quick boost make selling very hard, as you typically are working with low-volume price sensitive buyers and looking for a quick decision. The methods are not sustainable. Yet, when you do the hard work of setting up a total prospecting system, prospecting becomes much simpler. Won’t say easy, but simpler.

Why does prospecting easy rarely increase your income in a real way?

Three reasons.
1. The answer is never one thing. Never.
2. Change takes 30-90 days.
3. Systems rule. Systems have multiple parts and integrate tactics and tools.
4. What you do must be sustainable.

Sales productivity never increases substantially as a result of only one thing. Never.

The answer is always multiple factors that work together to produce a desired result. List selection, CRM selection and setup, your call & touch process, your script paths, your message preparation, all work together to get a desired result. On top of that you throw integration with websites, offers, content strategies, email follow-up and more and you have even more factors to consider.

To think that one thing will make the difference is misguided.

Your habits and comfort zones are your worst enemy.

Another fun fact sad but true. You are your worst enemy.

The search for easy is another way of saying I don’t want to do anything differently and I want to stay consistent with my beliefs about what will work.

If you are going to change your sales course, not only will you need to work on multiple factors at the same time but it is not going to happen overnight. 30 – 90 days is necessary to adopt meaningful substantial change in habits and behaviors that will boost your income.

Easy looks good because you don’t have to change. You can stay in your comfort zones.
Adults don’t break habits overnight. If you have been treading the sales waters it will take you some amount of time, more likely 60-90 days to really adopt new practices that will vault you forward.
Change is hard. Staying comfortable is easy.

Sales Systems Rule.

Building a strong sales foundation is hard work. The stronger the foundation you build the more results and income you will generate. Systems have multiple parts and integrate various strategies and tactics.
It is not easy to have the proper big picture view so that you know what blocks you need to build your foundation and how to connect them into a strong foundation.

It’s easy to place blocks down one at a time wherever you wish, but scattered actions don’t create a foundation you can build on.

Focus on creating a strong multi-part system that will work like an engine for you over a long period of time. Stop doing the easy thing of trying one tactic after another that disappoints.

Anything you do to improve sales must be sustainable

It’s easy to try something and abandon it when it doesn’t work right away.
It’s much harder to come back to something and tweak it or improve it and try again. And maybe again. Until it kicks in and you can use it over and over again.

True fact. Rarely do new sales tactics and behaviors work as desired right out of the gate. Anyone that thinks so will never succeed. Anyone that says so is a liar.

Even when you are doing the right things, if the behaviors are new they take time to learn. The tactics and strategies may be the right ones to vault you from treading water to riding the waves, but to get it all humming and working together is going to take consistent effort and multiple tries.

So prospecting the easy way is getting harder every day.

If you have been treading water for too long, step back and take a good long hard look at how you have been approaching things.

Abandon the search for easy and do the hard work of building a sustainable system and changing behaviors over a period of 60-90 days.