We are now two months into 2018. By March 1st, 41 business days will have passed which leaves 212 business days remaining in the year. That’s 1,696 business hours left to grow your company and hit your goals for 2018.
Have you set aside time to prospect for new customers? It’s one thing to set a customer or revenue growth goal for the year. It’s quite another to break that goal down into daily activities that will help you reach your growth goals. It starts with prospecting.
Prospecting for B2B (Business-to-Business) customers is a multi-prong approach. Whether you make outbound calls, send outbound emails, receive inbound inquires, use LinkedIn, or ask for referrals, you need a robust prospecting machine that fuels your sales pipeline. While you or your company may, or may not, utilize multiple prospecting activities, you will need to prospect for new business if growth is a company goal.
How do you break your revenue and customer growth goals down into daily prospecting activities? For example, let’s assume your goal is $1 million in new customer revenue (lifetime value), and your average revenue per customer is $5,000 (lifetime value). You will need to onboard 200 new customers.
How many daily outreach attempts do you need to make to onboard 200 new customers? In my experience, closing rates are 1% from a cold outreach attempt to a new customer coming onboard. That means you need to make 20,000 outreach attempts over the course of the year. Or 79 outreach attempts per business day, since there are 253 business days per year. If you dedicate 3 hours per business day to prospecting, and if you are a sales professional that’s the least you should do, you would need to average 26.3 outreach attempts per hour over a 3-hour period, for 253 days.
When you break down that daunting $1 million goal into daily prospecting activities, it’s manageable, and most importantly, controllable. You have complete control over the tasks you perform each day. Shouldn’t daily prospecting be a high-ranking task?
Jeb Blount, the author of ‘Fanatical Prospecting’, states, “There is no easy button in sales. Prospecting is hard, emotionally draining work, and it is the price you have to pay to earn a high income.”
Prospecting is hard and emotionally draining, but we’ve found that if you are disciplined in setting aside time each week to prospect, and accomplish your prospecting tasks, the result will be a successful year for you and your company!
About the Author:
Brad Gamble is Founder of The Selling Factory, Gainesville’s destination for sales training and development. For over 20 years Brad has dedicated himself to sales, sales management, entrepreneurship, mentoring, coaching, and building companies.
The Selling Factory, works with 37 student-interns whose sole job functions are to help companies prospect for B2B leads in many different market segments. Our client companies realize the importance of prospecting, and know how vital it is to reach their revenue and customer growth goals. Our student-interns, all currently enrolled at University of Florida, are trained in market research techniques, how to use LinkedIn to find decision-makers, and how to reach out to prospects in multiple B2B segments to help our client companies grow.
