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There’s an idea I share during my speeches that massively increases the business of everyone who follows it. It is not for the faint of heart and it takes some work, but it will significantly grow your business if you’re willing to do it.

Many of you are going to groan, wince, swear, or do all three when you hear this. Few people will be willing to do it. Please don’t be fooled by its simplicity: after all, most problems have simple solutions, we as humans just like to complicate them so we have an excuse for a lack of success. In any case, without further ado, here is the idea: spend a minimum of three to four hours a day, Monday through Friday, prospecting for new clients.

While that may sound like a lot of time, it’s actually 15 to 20 hours a week, out of your total hours of 168. Spending nine to 12 percent of that time doing the most important task you do as a salesperson, prospect for new business, is not all that much time. Now I know some of you are thinking, wait — closing business, not prospecting, is the most important task because without closing nothing happens, and you’d be right. At the same time, in order to get sales, you need plenty of prospects. You can’t close sales without first getting prospects, so whether you agree with me or not, just stick with me a little longer.

Some Real-Life Examples

Let me give you a couple of examples of people who have followed this. I have a friend who is one of the top Realtors in Central Massachusetts. When he started in the business, he was a transplant from New Jersey who knew absolutely no one in the area. He went to the manager of the office and asked him how he should get some sales. The manager told him to call the “expireds” list (people who had listed their house with an agent but it did not sell) and the list of FSBOs (for sale by owners). My friend was used to cold calling over the phone. One of his previous jobs was selling newspapers over the phone, so he was used to making a lot of calls and getting rejected. He proceeded to make 603 phone calls over the next month. From those calls, six people decided to list their houses with him, resulting in three sales over the next two months.

For sake of comparison, the average Realtor gets 12 listings a year and sells three houses. So, in two months, he equaled the average Realtors annual sales simply by making 603 phone calls in a month. By the way, the other Realtors in the office called him lucky, said he must know a bunch of people in the area or otherwise be connected, etc. None of that was true, he was just simply willing to do something the others were not — get on the phone and do a massive amount of prospecting.

In a similar story, I have another friend who lost his job in the banking industry when he was in his early 40s. Evaluating his life and options, he decided to embark on a dream he had years ago when he was in college. His dream was to become a chiropractor. He resumed and completed the studies he had started in college, got all the necessary training and, since he was starting a new career, decided to change his location too. He moved from Minnesota to San Diego. Upon his arrival in San Diego, one of the first things he did was to visit the offices of the local association of chiropractors. They turned him away at the door. They told him, “We already have too many chiropractors. There is one chiropractor for every eight people in San Diego.”

Now keep in mind, this wasn’t eight people looking for a chiropractor, it was every eight people. Let me ask you a question: if you had been my friend, what would you have done? I’m embarrassed to say I’m pretty sure I would have turned around and gone back to where I came from. I think the vast majority of people would have. The excuse would of course be along the lines of, the market is saturated with chiropractors, thus it’s not a good place to be a chiropractor. How could you possibly be successful in that market? My friend decided to stay. Over the next eight months, he went out seven days a week and knocked on the doors of houses and businesses. He had a questionnaire with him. The first question was: if a chiropractic office opened in your area, what would you like to see, just regular chiropractic, yoga, reiki, massage, other? The last question was: If I open a chiropractic office in the area, would you like an invitation to the open house? In the eight months, he knocked on over 20,000 doors and spoke to over 6,000 people, 4,000 of whom said they’d like an invitation to the open house. In month nine he sent out the invitations, opened the business in month ten, and in the next twelve months grossed 1.2 million in revenues which, at the time, put him in the top ten percent of chiropractic offices in San Diego, a city with too many chiropractors.

Granted, the chiropractor spent more than three or four hours and did it seven days a week. That said, he completely blew the average out of the water and beat 90 percent of other businesses in a saturated market. On the flip side, the Realtor wasn’t quite doing three hours Monday through Friday and yet he did 600 percent of the average sales. Either way, the numbers that work for everyone I’ve prescribed this to is prospecting for new business 15 to 20 hours a week. If you do that properly, you’ll see a huge increase in business.

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