In the End, There Is No Better Strategy

Read this article by James Clear. It’s about a young salesperson who makes 120 calls a day, moving a paper clip from one container to the other each time he dials the phone.

In the end, there is no better strategy than this. Pick up the phone, dial a number. Without hanging up the phone, dial the next number. Most of your calls will go to voicemail. Many will not be a good prospect for you or your company. Enough will answer, and enough will engage with you that you will build a pipeline, and you will win deals.

There is no substitute for consistent, massive action. Enough time and energy leveraged against any obstacle, and the obstacle eventually yields.

Needles and Hay Stacks

There is no list of prospects that your company can buy that will tell you exactly who is dissatisfied enough to change right now. If that list existed, your company would pay whatever was necessary to buy that list. Because you have no idea who is open to exploring change, you have to find them.

Talking to people is how you discover whether or not they are open to change. If you don’t talk to anyone, you never discover where they are and what they might need.

Selling isn’t a numbers game. You have to have chops to succeed in sales. Prospecting, however, is a numbers game. More activity produces more results, all things being equal.

What You Are Unwilling to Do

You might like social selling better. You might feel more comfortable connecting on LinkedIn than calling someone who isn’t expecting your call. You might also like inbound marketing and the leads they provide you, believing that the act of downloading a whitepaper suggests that the prospect is interested, making the next communication easier and more natural. You may even prefer straight up email, believing that warms up your prospect, when for most people it’s really just the preferred method for being rejected.

What if your competitor is willing to do what you are unwilling to do? What if your preferred method of prospecting is too slow and produces too few results? What if someone else is willing to do whatever it takes while you are unwilling?

Every prospecting method is valuable, and all should be employed. There is still no better strategy than this one.