5 Common Mistakes of Salespeople When Prospecting

Prospecting is an essential part of the salesperson’s job. Regardless of how well they know the product or how excellent they’re able to deliver a demo if the number of meetings with customers is below average, it becomes quite unlikely that they would consistently hit their targets. I would even name insufficient prospecting as one of the main reasons for not achieving the quotas for sales reps. But when it comes to prospecting activities junior reps tend to make a number of common mistakes that decrease the effectiveness of prospecting and have a direct negative impact on the pipeline creation. Let’s discuss these mistakes and review what can be done to avoid them.

Not preparing a target account list

The strategy of engaging the clients in the book of business should be a little bit more advanced than sorting the list by 1 criterion (e.g. current spending or company size) and going through the list from the top to the bottom. Generally speaking, the goal of prospecting activity is to get in touch with customers that have high upgrade potential in order to discover growth opportunities. Obviously, not all customers are equal from the growth potential perspective. So trying to engage everyone may indeed get the sales rep’s calendar fully booked, but these meetings may have little impact on pipeline creation. Instead, reps should consider blocking 1–1.5 hours per week on strategic account planning. During this session, they would review their book of business and break down accounts into logical buckets to be engaged during prospecting sessions in the following days. What those buckets would look like depends on the specifics of the company’s business and products, but here are some examples from our experience:

• Accounts by subscription type
• Accounts without add-ons
• New accounts
• Upcoming renewals
• Accounts with a large number of users
• And more

Preparing these target lists for prospecting also addresses a very important challenge for the reps (especially more junior) — analysis paralysis. Since outbound activities can be (and often are) stressful, reps tend to substitute the actual activities (phone, emails, other channels) with supporting activities such as analysis. So during the 1 or 2-hour blocker they put on their calendar for prospecting, they may have a false perception that they have accomplished a lot while the number of actual dials that brought results was minimal. When the target list is available, the rep doesn’t need to think — when it’s time for outbound activities, she would take the list, and call all the clients in it while having a clear picture of what messaging to use (since it would likely be the same since the clients were grouped by the same criteria).

Performing excessive research

Outbound activities need to be meaningful. Outside of the situation when a rep gets a brand new book and hasn’t spoken with any customers in it, a certain level of research needs to be accomplished before meeting with the customer. However, a common mistake is to overspend the time on such research trying to get as much information about the customer as possible. The only customer segment where such an approach may make sense is the enterprise segment. When a sales rep works with a relatively small number of customers with very large growth potential, it’s important to learn as much information about them as possible since these details may be useful in discovery and negotiation. However, when it comes to other customer segments, spending hours thoroughly reviewing customers’ websites, LinkedIn pages and other sources might be excessive. Remember that the goal of prospecting is not to sell — but to schedule the meeting with the client during which the rep would have the opportunity to ask discovery questions and (hopefully) sell. So during the prospecting phase of client engagement, a high-level customer analysis would likely be sufficient to choose the right messaging to incentivize them to schedule a meeting. And when the rep would be preparing for that meeting, it would be totally fine to gather some additional information about the client.

Lack of discipline with daily activities

Being an expert in the product, delivering demos, holding negotiations, and more wouldn’t be helpful if there’s little opportunity to leverage those skills in client meetings. Only those reps who are highly disciplined with their daily activities — phone calls, outbound emails, and outreach through other channels would have a sufficient number of meetings to build and maintain a strong pipeline that would enable them to consistently hit the target month after month. Unlike some other areas of work, outbound activities are not something that can be postponed for later and then completed in bulk. However, this is a mistake I often spot among junior reps. When I ask the question, why they haven’t made a target number of phone calls on Monday and Tuesday a common response is that “they have booked three hours for that on Friday”. It simply doesn’t work like that — only daily incremental steps would ensure that the number of meetings is going to be growing. Outbound activities are also often deprioritized compared to others. I hear things like “I spent the first 3.5 hours on Monday cleaning my email and then had several back-to-back meetings, so I didn’t have the time to make calls”. In fact, this was not about not having the time, but about not prioritizing. Please don’t get me wrong — I’m not recommending to ignore customer emails. But instead of spending almost half of my working day on them, I would quickly scan the mailbox, check which emails are burning matter, address them, and then focus on phone calls and other outbound activities and return to the remaining emails at the end of the day. Discipline is what differentiates average performers from great ones.

Not taking into account timezones of customers

While this is something that can be easily fixed, I’ve personally witnessed more than once how the relationship between the customer and the salesperson didn’t start well simply because the client was engaged too early or too late in the day because the time zone wasn’t taken into account. The majority of the CRM systems (e.g. Salesforce, Hubspot, and others) allow us to quickly see the timezone of the customer before engaging him. I usually recommend to my team members to group the customers by timezone while planning outbound activities. This enables them not to think about time zones at all reserving particular days for specific time zones. The only thing that changes as a result of that grouping is the time blocked for outbound activities — for example, the reps located on the West Coast would start their Mondays engaging the EST customers, but on Tuesdays, they would put the outbound activities blocker on their calendars two hours after the start of the working day to call PST customers.

Not making notes

There are a few things more irritating for clients than continuously re-telling the sales reps what are their current challenges, what they expect to accomplish with the product, and how it’s been progressing. It might not be the current rep’s fault that his or her predecessor didn’t leave any notes in the CRM, but they need to make sure that this mistake is not repeated moving forward. All the critical information pieces about the customer need to be properly documented: what is the actual size of the company, what was discussed in the previous meetings, what are the challenges the client was facing, what are the growth plans, and more. Again, most of the CRMs available today provide an opportunity to not only track notes but to set reminders regarding the next steps. For example, if a rep agreed with the client to circle back to the discussion on a potential purchase of a different subscription tier in about a month, it is critical that the rep creates a reminder task so that in a month she would get automatically notified to get in touch with the client. Building the right routines around putting notes in the system is not about doing what the management team says — the key benefactors are the reps themselves. It is super easy to forget something about a particular client — especially when there are dozens or even hundreds of them in the book of business.

As you can see most of the mistakes covered above can be avoided relatively easily. It’s all about understanding the why behind them and the direct benefits for the reps of doing things differently.