Are your salespeople following a recipe for new business success?

Most productive business professionals have a calendar that fills quickly and fully. If a particular task doesn’t make it into your calendar, there’s probably a good chance it’s just not going to happen. Even with the best of intentions, how often do you find yourself with not enough time in the day to complete everything on your task list, only to have it roll into the next day or even next week? This can be an even greater challenge with tasks that can be somewhat unpleasant.

Prospecting may be one of those uncomfortable things for professionals in a business-development or selling role depending upon your communication style and skill comfort. Many professionals procrastinate on prospecting because of the inherent rejection. Instead, they find other seemingly important tasks to fill their time. At Sandler, we call this “creative avoidance,” the predisposition to do anything else on my task other than prospecting.

Going back to your calendar — if the time to prospect is not “time-blocked” in your calendar, how likely is it that it’s going to get done? Unfortunately, many salespeople simply aren’t honest with themselves or their leadership about this. They will tell leadership they are prospecting even though they don’t have a tangible behavioral plan to follow.

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We call this plan a Cookbook. It is a list of the leading indicator prospecting behaviors that a sales or business-development person will commit to (dials to new prospects, asking for referrals, attending networking and trade-show events) along with goals for each behavior and recorded “actuals” for each behavior. The plan also includes the lagging indicator (outcomes) of those behaviors — things such as new conversations with qualified prospects, new appointments set for first-time sales calls with a new prospect and of course the conversion of those sales calls into proposals/demos/quotes and ultimately new closed business.

If a salesperson cannot produce a behavioral plan to share with sales leadership, sales leadership is forced to focus only on the most lagging indicator of performance: sales. At this point, it is far too late to produce immediate results and the merry-go-round of missing goals and reprimanding salespeople for missing them continues.

To create a new business Cookbook, you’re going to have to decide what prospecting activities are worth budgeting time, energy and money for. That might be making cold calls, setting up specific types of appointments, going to networking meetings, scheduling speaking engagements or perhaps just mining LinkedIn for referrals.

Once you’ve identified your activities, create your concrete schedule for how often you will do them. How many new phone calls do you need to make to close a sale? How many conversations at a networking meeting do you need to have to have X number of new conversations. Do you need to spend an hour a week on LinkedIn, or an hour a month?

Once your Cookbook is created, schedule the time in your calendar. This is an appointment with yourself to do one of the highest productivity-yielding behaviors that you can possibly do. Remember, if a sales or business-development person at a business isn’t prospecting, who is? This is a primary reason for your existence in the company.

Now that your plan is created and you are working it and measuring your outcomes, tweak it from time to time (we suggest at least quarterly) to identify what’s working, what’s not. What you should do more of and less of and then make those adjustments.

For high-performing organizations that continually beat revenue goals, prospecting plans aren’t optional, nor is not meeting the agreed-upon leading indicator activity goals. As leadership, this process does not need to be dictated to the team, but rather co-built, along with an understanding that each person’s Cookbook may have some variations in terms of activities and numbers. If your organization doesn’t have new business behavioral plans, get started today and you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the elevation in your lagging indicators in the near future.

Bob Bolak is president of Sandler Training. He can be reached at 303-928-9163 or bbolak@sandler.com.