The best way to prospect for sales leads is to do it daily.
Whatever your mix of sales prospecting activity - cold calls, emails, letters, or grabber packages - you gotta do some activity every day.
When you do prospecting work daily, a few things happen.
You start working through the emotional and mental blocks that you may have had towards prospecting work.
Why? Because you start to see results, and you calibrate your emotions to the positive work-reward payoff.
Research has shown that it takes about 21 days to create new habit. That's really not very long - only 3 weeks time.
As you develop your new habits, it becomes easier to pickup where you left off each day. There's less "rehearsal" necessary for how you're going to say things, less psyching yourself up, and more confidence as your fears get smaller and smaller until they eventually disappear.
Surprisingly you will develop relationships with people you've never spoken with before, who've never returned your call, and who you don't even know you have a relationship with yet.
This happens because some prospects are noticing and paying attention to the messages you are delivering, even if they haven't responded yet. After a number of contacts from you, they start to get a sense of who you are and some to begin to feel as if they know you even before they've met or spoken with you.
An hour of sales prospecting every business day of the year adds up to 260 hours of prospecting every year. Two hours a day adds up to 540 hours. Three hours a day adds up to 780 hours or little more than a month of prospecting time.
With 1-3 hours a day of prospecting, anyone can get more than full pipeline of well qualified sales leads.
So if you are going to do this kind of sales prospecting work, you need to have good sales lead qualifying skills. To learn the best question-based, no-pitch sales qualifying techniques out there go get your copy of Persuasive Selling Skills now.
A high activity of sales prospecting coupled with good sales qualifying abilities will give you a full pipeline of sales leads that you can sort through for the best deals to work and close with confidence.
Sell with Pride,
Shameless Shamus
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Concept Air Systems
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