Yeah, prospecting is hard. (Not news.) Most sellers don’t like doin’ it because, well…. rejection, rejection, rejection.

But you’re not most sellers; you’re smart and ambitious and understand that your garden will only bear vegetables if you tend to it. (Whatever…use a metaphor that works for you.) Point is…no prospecting, no pipeline, no pipeline, no commission check. No commission check…um…now what?

The key is to create a daily prospecting habit so it’s not so daunting to start again after not doing it for a few days. As this is the first day of the month, it’s a good time to starting the habit today.

You are so much better at prospecting than you think you are! You just get rusty, and then it’s daunting to restart. Days go by, and boom, your pitch-meeting calendar gets lonely. Totally understandable. It’s not the rejection that serves as an obstacle for you – heck, you’ve dealt with rejection you’re entire career – it’s getting to the point where prospecting is a habit. So the easy answer is: make prospecting a habit!

Focus on incrementality. There’s a perception that prospecting requires big chunks of time…the bigger, the better because, as they say (whoever they are), momentum comes when you commit a big chunk of time. Well, that’s Grandad-era thinking (nothing against your gramps)… modern-day time demands and pressures make it such that if you can squeeze in 20 minutes of prospecting, you’re on the right track. The key…stuff as many 20-minute blocks of prospecting into your week as possible.

Think about it this way, if you commit a 20-minute prospecting block each day, that’s a total of one hour and 40 minutes a week of prospecting…out of, let’s say, a 50-hour work week, that’s 3.3% of your week…is that enough to get you into the TOP 10%? It’s a good start.

Head to your calendar and establish a 30-minute prospecting block today when you can dedicate your energies to outreach.

When the timer starts, write the following on a post-it note and stick it to your laptop: "No distractions. No excuses. Hard Core Prospecting".

Seriously. Do that. It doesn’t matter if you’re cold-calling new prospects or mining new activity with old customers…focus on getting phone calls, video meetings, or face-to-face meetings on the calendar. And keep that focus for 30 minutes. Regardless of the results, you’ll feel so much better for doing this today!

Instead of following traditional prospecting guidelines, like, 30 contacts equals one booked meeting, change your thinking from outreach to time. How much time does it take you to get a meeting? It’s also okay to chart the other outputs: calls, emails, and smoke signals are the three basic output measurements. But when you can track prospecting time against results, you have the formula for the time needed to get your desired results. That’s the formula that should drive your actions.

This time-based prospecting approach works best when you maintain your focus for a certain block of time. Start with blocks of time you can handle…30 minutes at most at the start. As recommended in the DO, write that post-it note that exhorts you to focus. Turn off all the junk that will interrupt you – the Slacks about Bobby uploading a new kitchen cleaning schedule, the notifications about the weather in Bermuda, the texts from Etsy telling you 1970s hippie tank top tees are on sale…turn it all off. You know you can bring your steely focus to the forefront when necessary, so let’s do it today. Let’s find that one prospect who will meet with you!