How to Give Up Non-Deals

The only reason you keep working on deals you know you don’t have a real chance of closing is because you don’t have real opportunities with which to replace them. In order to rid yourself of time-wasting non-deals, you need to replace them with real opportunities.

Massively Increase Your Prospecting Efforts

There isn’t any way to create more opportunities that doesn’t require you spend more time and more energy prospecting. You cannot create new opportunities until you develop new relationships.

The more prospecting you do, the more relationships you develop, and the more opportunities you will create. The faster you do the necessary prospecting work, the faster you will produce the opportunities that allow you to ditch non-opportunities.

Vary Your Approach and Use All Methods and Tools

Some of your prospective clients will respond to your phone call, cold, warm, or whatever. Others will respond to a LinkedIn connection. A small few may respond to an email request for a meeting, if it’s personal and value creating.

The best place to start is referrals. The second best place to start is with deals that you lost in competitive situations in the past.

There is no plan that includes waiting for inbound marketing or lead generation to do this work for you. You need to consistently use every method and every tool available.

Build a Serious Plan to Nurture Your Dream Clients

The problem with acting with a great sense of urgency is that it can be sporadic and undisciplined. There are some prospects for whom you need a proactive, disciplined, professionally persistent approach. These are your dream clients.

A nurture plan is a blueprint for contacting your best prospects over time using a campaign. That campaign starts with a message that creates value for your dream client. That might be a blog post, white paper, or case study. That content is followed up with a phone call.

Your nurture plan can be written in advance and used to pursue the small number of your very best prospects over the course of a year. You will get some of these dream clients to respond and engage with you. You will win some of them. Those will be your best deals and the best use of your time. But you still have to prospect and for other opportunities while you are nurturing your dream clients.