The 8 Sales Prospecting Mindsets of Top Earners Pt 8: Prospecting for the Long Haul

By Jeff Shore

Prospecting is not a one-time thing. If you’re going to be great at prospecting, and I mean truly great, then you’re going to create a habit of practicing your prospecting activities. Let’s dive into prospecting for the long haul. 

There are skills involved in prospecting; we all know that. But I would suggest that your mindset is more important than your skill set. If your mindset is wrong, it doesn’t matter what your skill set will be. 

When we look at six-figure sales professionals, what makes them six-figure? What makes them six-figure is their ability to perform consistently over a long period of time. They are masters of persistence. Persistence means we stay diligent to do those things that will matter day after day after day. 

Darren Hardy talks about this in his book, The Compound Effect. The idea is that small little things that we do day after day after day accumulate to make a huge difference. The big problem with prospecting, a lot of salespeople only do it when their sales manager is yelling. They only do it when they get a little desperate for a sale.

Great salespeople recognize this is part of the discipline. This is part of my habit, I have it to do this day after day after day. Now think about that for just a moment. Let’s suppose that in your prospecting, you were able to identify one new contact a day if that was your goal. I want to identify one new contact. I want to reach out, to connect with one new prospect a day.

Over the course of the year, there are 250 working days. So if I looked at it and said, I want to connect with one person a day, you just connected to 250 people. If 10% of those converted into sales, that’s 25 sales that you weren’t going to have, anyway.

This is the idea. This is the paradigm. I want to be able to look at it and say it is a long, long walk for me to be able to get this done. It’s not a sprint. It takes a long time to be able to do this effectively. But that’s what the pros do. They recognize it’s not about quick fixes. It’s not about what happens today. It’s not about instant gratification. It’s about doing those things right day after day after day. 

Top performers in any walk of life are going to tell you this when they take time off of those disciplines, when they take time off of those habits of success, their entire performance and their company results are all going to falter.

I want to challenge you to look at it and say, how do you carry this forward? How do you plan for it? I do think, by the way, that the concept of identifying and connecting with one new contact every single day can make a huge difference and would prove to be a wonderful place to start.

Now, you may need to attempt several contacts in order to reach one person, but the idea of contacting one new person a day could have a profound impact on your prospecting and on the way that you do your job, and the way that you find your success.

The fact of the matter is that so many salespeople are waiting for the business to come to them. The best of the best are the ones who go out there, and they get it done. That is the prospecting paradigm of six-figure sales professionals. 

Until next time my good friends, learn more, to earn more!


FREE TRAINING:
Get BRAND-NEW episodes of Jeff’s 5 Minute Sales Training sent to your inbox every Saturday!

Sign up below.

 

About the Author: Jeff Shore

Jeff Shore is the Founder and CEO of Shore Consulting, Inc. a company specializing in psychology-based sales training programs. Using these modern, game-changing techniques, Jeff Shore’s clients delivered over 145,000 new homes generating $54 billion in revenue last year.