Let’s not kid ourselves: Prospecting is tough. It is hard. I wrote the books High‑Profit Prospecting and A Mind for Sales because in order to prospect right, you have to have a mind for sales.

I want to walk you through 10 ways how you can make prospecting work.

1. Identify Your ICP

You will never be able to do effective prospecting if you are just spraying and praying.

You need to know who your ICP, or ideal customer profile, is. Get tight and get specific.

The tighter you are, the more specific you are. As a result, you are going to be more confident and be able to ask better questions.

You are going to be able to engage them deeper because you are going to know more about them. You are going to understand their business better, which will lead to them having confidence in you. You will close sales faster and you will prospect much faster by staying very tight with your ideal customer profile.

2. Block Time to Prospect

Do not just sit there and say, “Oh, I’ll get to prospecting when I finish taking care of all this other stuff.”

You will never get to it because that “other stuff” will occupy your time. Why? Because you don’t really want to prospect. You have to block the time.

Managers, if you are reading this, you have to make sure your people have time blocked in their calendars to prospect and are following through on it.

It is neither thinking about prospecting, nor is it planning or preparing to prospect — it’s prospecting.

It is going toe-to-toe with prospects. It is making the call, sending the email and it is engaging right then and there. That is what you have to be zeroed in on.

3. Consistent Process

Now, being consistent is not the same as sending an identical email out to the same person 10 times. I am talking about a consistent process.

A consistent process means that if you have a cadence built up and built out, you stick with it. You continuously work your way through it. Do not deviate from this process.

The vast reason why more salespeople are not successful than any other reason is that they are not consistent with how they prospect.

4. Listen and Adapt

If you are focused on your ICP, you are going to hear them talking about things and hear what people within your ICP are saying about this or that.

Listening to this is going to allow you to adapt, and you are going to be able to modify this question here, this idea there, and so on.

Listening and adapting is going to help you become that much more effective; it supports the whole process when you are zeroed in on your ICP.

5. No Distractions

You cannot afford to be distracted. You have to stay very, very focused. Often times I see salespeople getting caught up in this SAS tool or that app or that “hack.” Do not allow distractions of any form to take hold of your day.

When you have time to prospect, you prospect.

6. Believe in Yourself

Believe in yourself and in the outcome you can help create. If you do not believe in yourself, why would you ever expect others to believe in you?

Believing in yourself is also going to give you the confidence to pick up the phone and make the call.

Pick up the phone and make the call because the telephone is what is going to really make prospecting work.

Many people say, “The telephone doesn’t work,” but what it comes down to is the fact that they do not believe in themselves and the outcomes they can create by doing so. The telephone does work, but you have to let it.

7. Know the Outcomes

Know the outcomes you create. It is not what or how you sell, or the service or the product, but it is the outcomes you create.

How does the customer benefit from buying from you? That is the outcome.

You want to be zeroed in and focused on that; when you understand the outcomes, it is amazing how much better you can be at asking the right questions, having the right dialogue and being more comfortable.

8. Tailor Your Process to the ICP

This means you may have three ICPs.

You may have one ICP that is a certain level or position that you are contacting. You may have another ICP that is a certain type of industry, and you may have another belonging to a different industry.

Each one of those ICPs is going to have a separate cadence. Do not think that you are going to use one cadence for all of them.

This is why I advise against having five or six different ICPs. I tell salespeople, “Have two or three at the most, and in rare exceptions, you are going to get to four ICPs.”

Because you have to have a separate cadence for each one, you simply cannot manage that many.

9. Use All Methods to Prospect

This includes the telephone! Do not sit there and think to yourself, “I am just going to email and that is the way I prospect — sending out a lot of emails.”

That is a good way to wind up in spam folders and never be seen again.

You want to use every method out there because what you may feel is your preferred method may not be what the other person’s preferred method is.

This is why I use voicemail, telephone, email, text messaging, social media and video. I am going to use every medium possible because everybody has their own preferred communication method.

10. Set and Monitor Your Goals

You need to have goals and monitor those goals. This comes down to your prospecting period. Maybe you have set aside a three-hour period of prospecting today — what is your goal?

How many phone calls are you going to make? How many conversations are you going to have?

You set that goal beforehand, and then at the end of that three-hour period, you evaluate your performance. How did you do? You have to be continuously monitoring it.

Do not be dismayed if you are not getting the results you are expecting because many times, you are just laying the groundwork.

It is like the farmer in early spring. They do not know what their crops are going to yield come fall. They do not know but they are tilling the soil, preparing the ground and putting the seeds in place.

They do not know what they harvest until late summer or early fall. Your prospecting is the same. You have to set and monitor your goals and be patient.

I love prospecting because it opens the doors to help others see and achieve what they didn’t think was possible. Let me know what you love about prospecting.

Great selling.

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