JB: I’d get them on the telephone

[rifat28dddd]

AP: Great. So basically what you’re finding is, as you say, you put a stake in the ground with activity. People just aren’t making calls, fundamentally.

JB: I mean, I do this for a living. I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I can’t think of a single situation in the last 30 years where I’ve had a sales team that’s failing, that I’ve walked in the door, whether as a consultant or whether they’ve been my own sales team, where I can’t draw a direct line to the failure to prospect, the failure to open doors, no matter how you choose to do that, and the pipeline being empty. I mean, the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline. And the number one reason for an empty pipeline is the failure to prospect.

The Best Method for Maximizing Your Prospecting Efforts
AP: Yeah, absolutely. So your number one recommendation then, to play on that term, as if you were going to get to an entrepreneur or a small business owner to structure and to maximize their prospecting efforts, would be what?

I mean, the easiest, fastest way to open doors right now thailand telegram data is get on the phone. I mean, maybe in a decade, something changes. But if I were to sit down with a group of people and a great example is a software company that I’ve been working with for the last couple of years, when I first met them, they were $10 million behind their number and it was August. And what did we do?

We sat down, most companies have a database, we just went through their database and we started developing lists based on the highest probability that the deals at the top of that list would move into the sales cycle. And we got their people in a room and we picked up a telephone, and we started dialing. And four months later they hit their number.

The problem was prospecting. So the first thing you do, I mean this isn’t rocket science. You get a list of prospects. You try to put some thought behind that list to make sure you’re calling the highest quality and highest probability prospects first.

You work your way down that list, then you rinse and you repeat. And then once you’ve got stuff in the pipeline, then you can really start working on your sales process, on presentation skills, on your messaging, on making sure that you’ve got good buyer maps, and all of the things that drive a sale through the pipeline and create velocity through the pipeline.

You can do all that, but none of that matters if the pipeline is empty. I tell sales managers all the time: if your salespeople aren’t prospecting, you have no other options. There’s nothing else that you can do.