Why Sales Professionals Should Never Prospect

Prospecting is a monotonous activity with little results.  Think of your first sales job where they had you cold call.  You cold called all day, dialed hundreds of numbers to get what--maybe 3 or 4 prospects identified?  Talk about a huge waste of valuable time.

 We say don’t do it. Prospecting is the activity of a sales laborer.  As a sales professional, your time is far too valuable for this administrative, time intensive, low output activity.  

Understand that prospecting is the monotonous activity of separating the few prospects from hundreds or thousands of suspects.  So if you had a list of everyone in Westport Connecticut, an area just outside Manhattan where many celebrities have homes, you can safely assume that most residents have money.  But how do you find the 1% of the residents that have interest in your product or service?  Let a sales laborer do it!

 Here are some examples of having sales laboreres do your prospecting:

1. You outsource prospecting to a company that will design and print and mail a postcard or letter for you.  That company and the post office mail carriers are your sales laborers to deliver your 10,000 mailers. The 1% of the residents that reply (say 100 people) are “prospects” and these are the people you should talk to now that the prospecting has been done.  As a sales professional, you talk to prospects, you don't locate them.

2.  You hire a telemarketer or telemarketing company to call those 10,000 residents with your presentation (could be an invitation to a seminar, offer for a booklet, etc).  You only talk to the people who express interest, i.e. the 100 people who identify themselves as qualified prospects.

3.  You place an advertisement in the Westport edition of the NY Times offering your booklet "How the Rich Retain Wealth in a Depression.”  You talk to the 100 people that request your booklet.  The NY Times is your sales laborer.

4. You hire a company to run ads for you on the Internet and find prospects that meet your criteria. You pay them per lead.  So of the thousands of people that see your ad, you pay for and have an outside firm identify the right prospects.

Yes, these prospecting activities all cost money but not very much.  If you don’t want to invest in your business, then get a job as an employee because you’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur.  You can be a sales laborer for someone else.

Sure, prospecting is the lifeblood of any business but you, the sales professional, shouldn’t be doing it because as the business owner, this is an activity you orchestrate and delegate.