The Gods of Prospecting smile on salespeople with high activity. They frown on those who wait passively for good things to come to them.
When you are making your calls, you are rewarded with prospects who are right now dissatisfied enough to entertain change. Because you are doing the work, you have the good fortune of bumping into more than your fair share of prospective clients who are motivated to change. But when you aren’t making your calls, you don’t connect with dissatisfied prospects, because you aren’t connecting enough.
Your high prospecting activity is also rewarded with the rarest of all rare events in sales, the “call back.” When you are making your calls and doing your prospecting work, you will have prospective clients call you back after you leave a voice mail. These “calls backs” are easy to turn into appointments. You know there is some interest. But when you make too few calls and leave too few messages, your phone will never ring.
When you are following up your calls and nurturing the relationships you need by sharing your best ideas with your dream clients, you will inevitably receive calls and emails from people who are exploring change. They may have refused a dozen requests to meet, but your nurturing efforts, your phone calls, your emails, and your ideas build up over time. You establish yourself as a value creator, and you prove that your pursuit is real—unlike the fly-by-night salespeople who make one call and disappear. These prospective clients reach out to you because you’ve done the work. If you haven’t done the work, you don’t deserve an opportunity.
High activity is always rewarded, even though the Gods of Prospecting aren’t going to be swayed by a single day or two of high activity. Little activity is always punished with poor results and very few lucky breaks.
Curse the Gods of Prospecting and shake your fist at the sky if you want to. But the only sure way to cure activity problems is with activity. You make your own luck by working hard on prospecting.
