8 Ways to Improve Your Prospecting

The following article is an original blog post and was recently published in NAR's young professional blog.

As a sales professional, you should be conducting direct sales activities everyday that will add new prospects into your lead list. But sometimes you get into a rut or you need new ideas to help grow your list. Here are eight ways to improve your prospecting routine in order to get more clients.

Inspect Your Lead List

The most crucial checklist for anyone working in a sales position is your lead list. Your lead list will identify potential clients and where they stand in your sales cycle. At a minimum, you should be inspecting this list on a daily basis. For some people, checking this list multiple times a day is useful as well.

Having an adequate system – whether an online CRM, a spreadsheet, or index cards – to track, upgrade, downgrade, and to make notes on a particular lead is the lifeblood for a sales associate. You should always know exactly where your client is in the lifecycle of the sales process. Plus, if you can identify the likelihood of closing a particular lead, the more worthwhile your lead list.

Calendar Checking

As a sales professional, you probably rely on the records in your calendar just as much as your do as the data in your lead list. You probably note the time, date, location, and with whom you are spending every meeting, every breakfast, and every networking event with. Why not tap into all of that useful data?

Go back one day, one week, one month, and one year in your calendar. Look at what you were doing during those intervals. Who were you meeting with? Where were you meeting? Did you have coffee with a potential new client a month ago? Were you at an out-of-state conference last year? Follow up with all of the people to stay in touch or remind them of your encounters. It is an easy and free way to stay in front of your clients.

Warm Calling

Inspecting and checking your lead list is a great internal control to see where each one of your clients are in the lifecycle of your sales process. But if you never talk to any of your leads, then your lead list is practically worthless.

Use your lead list to engage in warm calling. Email your existing clients just to say hello and catch up. Text some clients who are just starting in your sales loop to give them some useful bits of information about your industry. Call a lead that may have been lost a few months ago to follow up and see if there is anything you could have done better to keep them as a client.

Networking Events

The best and most meaningful form of sales comes from face-to-face, in-person meetings. The only way to get these types of meetings is to meet new people in the first place. That is where networking events come in.

Look at your calendar for the coming weeks and if you have some openings, fill them with networking events. The beauty of networking events is that they can be anything from a kickball game with your friends to an industry specific seminar. Great sales professionals know how to network!

Social Media Engagement

By now, you should have a profile on at least three different social media outlets. The more social media outlets you have a profile on the better. But, it isn’t just about the number of profiles you have. The most important metric in social media is engagement.

To really see a return from using social media, you need to engage those on that social media platform. Don’t just post and spread your content. Like, follow, and comment on other people’s content. Start discussions with other people. Make connections with the influencers on each social media outlet so you can grow your sales by making more strategic connections.

Write a Blog Post

If the adage in the traditional media world is “content is king” then the adage in online media should be “new content is king.” Everyone with a website should be posting new blog content at least once a week. The more original, quality content you can promote the better. There are studies showing significant gains in traffic the more often you post content.

Unlike social media engagement where you are purposefully finding and communicating with other people on the different outlets, posting an article is an insightful way to get your message to your audience. Writing lots of new and inspiring content not only will get you more social media engagement, it will also start to brand you as an expert in your particular craft.

Make a Video

If writing a blog post is meant to establish yourself as an authority in a particular subject and to grow your audience, creating a video is how to spread your message exponentially quicker. If one of your social media profiles isn’t already on a video sharing outlet, you need to add it to your portfolio immediately.

Currently, nearly 3 billion hours of online media content is watched on a monthly basis in the United States alone. That means every person living in America is watching a little less than 10 hours of video online per month. If your videos aren’t part of those programming decisions, you are missing out on a great deal of potential traffic.

Cold Calling

Finally, the least enjoyable of any sales activity for most sales professionals is the cold call. Whether it is dialing every business in a certain radius or canvasing office parks in a certain part of town, cold calling can take many different shapes and styles. While today’s consumer is less and less likely to buy into a service or product from a cold call, it is still a way to make new connections. Once you have this new connection in your lead list, it is up to you how well you can cultivate them into a new client.

The next time you sit down at your desk and scratch your head as to what to do next in your sales career, think back on some of these routine refreshers and you’ll be growing your sales list in no time at all.