While a lack of sales can be caused by something other than not having enough prospects, generally speaking, most salespeople who miss their numbers do so because they have far too few selling opportunities, which is usually caused by having far too few qualified prospects. Following are some ideas to ensure you never have this problem again.

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Ideas to Get All the Prospects You’ll Ever Need

• Spend at least four hours a day prospecting.

Yes, four hours, that’s not a misprint. In order to get a sufficient number of leads, you need to spend a significant amount of time prospecting. For most salespeople spending far too little time prospecting is their primary issue. If you’re wondering where you’ll find four hours in a day, the answer is simple:

First, stop wasting time on unqualified prospects you’ll never convert. You know who these people are, you’ve been calling them for months, maybe even years. Either get rid of them immediately, or give them one final call and tell them this is the last time you can contact them, it’s do business now or never.

Second, stop over-contacting and irritating the qualified leads. As mentioned in a previous article, the reason salespeople tend to keep unqualified prospects in their funnel and harass and over-contact the qualified leads is that they have no one else to call. Spending a lot of time prospecting will give you an abundance of prospects and solve both these issues.

Third, cut out all the busy work you do to avoid the hard work of prospecting. Most of us are very creative at coming up with ways to avoid hard work from cleaning up our desks and doing paperwork in the middle of the day, to scheduling doctor appointments and other personal items during prime calling times. Stop it!

Finally, schedule your prospecting time and stick to the schedule. For example, block off 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. for prospecting and don’t allow anything to infringe on that time.

I realize that if you are doing little or no prospecting, four hours is a big jump, so start with an hour or two and build from there. For 95 percent of you, following this one tip alone will give you all the prospects you’ll ever need.

• Be consistent.

A big problem I see with prospecting is a lack of consistency. A salesperson does a ton of prospecting until he or she has enough business or appointments, then they stop prospecting. When business and appointments drop, they go back to doing a ton of prospecting again. In order to be good and stay good at prospecting and have a steady stream of prospects, you have to be consistent. Sure, there may be times when you’re out of balance, but even when you have plenty of business and appointments, block off some time to prospect.

• Choose active rather than passive prospecting activities.

Phone calls, knocking on doors, asking for and calling referrals, and networking are all examples of active prospecting because you control the contact. Mailers, social media, the internet, radio and television ads, and other similar marketing techniques are all passive because you have to rely on someone to contact you. When it comes to prospecting you want to be in control of the numbers, and the only way to do that is through active prospecting. While it’s good to have aspects of both active and passive marketing in your prospecting plan, far too many salespeople put most of their effort into passive methods because they are easier and more comfortable. On the flip side, they are also far less effective than active prospecting.

• Get better at prospecting.

Of course you always want to be getting better in each area of the sales process and prospecting is no exception. When you get better at prospecting, you can make fewer calls and work less, while at the same time getting better, more qualified prospects. Read books and articles, listen to and watch programs of prospecting, and perhaps most important, find people who are highly successful at getting lots of good, qualified prospects, find out what they do, and then take the same actions.

• Do whatever you have to in order to get the prospects you need.

You need to be committed to getting the number of prospects you have to get in order to be successful. If it takes six hours of cold calling and making calls on the weekend, that’s what you do. The bottom line is you must be willing to make tons of phone calls, knock on tons of doors, and talk to tons of people in order to get the prospects you need.

• Keep track of numbers and results.

If you go to a networking event for four hours and talk to one or two average prospects, that is not a good use of prospecting time. If you get on the phone for four hours and get 10 qualified prospects, that is a good use of prospecting time. You have to know where you’re effective and not effective and spend your time on the right activities.

• Prospecting is a numbers game.

The more people you talk to, the more prospects you will get. If you talk to enough people during the day, you will eventually bump into someone who says, “I need what you have,” or “I know someone who needs what you have.” If you’re going to get an abundance of prospects, you need to talk to an abundance of people.