I used to call it the Roller Coaster ride. As a salesperson, I was so busy selling and closing deals that I ran out of time to do any prospecting. If truth be told, I found it a jolly good excuse not to.
Prospecting is hard. It’s a constant stream of rejection, and most sellers don’t like that, so any excuse and they’ll put it off. “I’m too busy closing boss, to prospect as well.” And the outcome was a barren period of business as I had to start from scratch building my sales funnel whilst no sales were being made. The classic Roller Coaster.
I learnt the hard lesson and however busy I was, I always made sure I prospected the equivalent of one day a week. I still do now – I market one day a week on my own business. Marketing is used by salespeople to make prospecting sound grander.
The reason I do a whole day a week, which might seem excessive is to do with closing ratios.
Let me explain.
My closing ratio at the time was 4:1. In other words for every sale I made, I needed four people to start the sales process. So for every transaction, I made I needed to put four people back into the sales funnel.
Not one for one, which many sellers work with, but four for one. This realisation made me go for prospecting with a revised vigour as I wanted to avoid the Roller Coaster or famine and feast of sales. Moreover, it worked.
