Commandment I: Make an Appointment with Yourself for 60 to 90 Minutes a Day to Prospect

Prospecting is a required discipline to sales success. It requires rigor and focus. It is very intense, so only prospect for 60 to 90 minutes a day to avoid burn out. You can find many reasons to put off prospecting until later in the day and tell yourself, "I will do it when circumstances are better." I can assure you that the time to make your prospecting calls will never be exactly right.

Make an appointment on your daily planner and protect it. Look at it this way, "It is an appointment for the largest sale I have ever made." The next record setting sale of your career has yet to happen, and it will come from a brand new client. Where and how do you get to that brand new client? It truly is an appointment for the beginning of the largest commission check of your career.

Commandment II: See the End before the Beginning

Steven Covey, in his book, "The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People," tells us to see the end before you begin. Dr. Covey is, in effect, telling us to establish a goal and then develop a plan to work towards that goal. This sage advice works well in prospecting and business development.

Commandment III: Set Goals

Pipeline management is the best sales tool available. When you know how many face to face calls you need to make to get a prospect to move to a proposal, and know how many proposals you have to present to close a sale, you are in total control of your success.

Apply the pipeline management theory to your cold call prospecting time. How many conversations do you have to have to get one appointment? Based on your pipeline number for required face to face meetings, you know exactly how many conversations you need to have, to set the right amount of appointments that will produce the net end results you want. So how many dials does it take to have a conversation? Now you have total pipeline management control: "x" dials = "y" conversations = "z" face to face meetings = "w" proposals = $$$$$ closes.

Once you have established the number of dials and conversations you must make, you can easily set goals. If a number of dials or conversations did not achieve the needed results, do not beat yourself up. Over the long term everything will balance out and you will achieve all your pipeline goals.

Commandment IV: Make Your Calls Brief

The objective of the prospecting call is simply to determine if a lead is qualified or not qualified. If they are not qualified you have two choices: a) trash the lead, or b) check back at a later date. You are going to get 10, 20, 30 even 40 non-qualified leads for every qualified lead. That is a lot of "no's," so play to win and go for the "no." Come from abundance! You have hundreds or thousands of leads to talk to, to find the 10 to 50 who will buy. What I say to myself is, "I have 780 people to talk to in order to find the 12 that will become my client. Sir or madam, can we speed this call up so I can find those 12 people from this large list?" That is what Sales Focus salespeople truly believe.

Your prospecting call should last approximately two to five minutes at the most. Focus on introducing yourself, your product /service, what "pain" issues others had who decided to do business with you, does the prospect on the phone have any of these pains and if so are they important enough for the prospect to invite you in for a face to face meeting.

Commandment V: Be Prepared with a List of Names before you Call

Not being prepared with a list of names will force you to devote much, if not all of your allocated prospecting time, to finding the names you need. If not properly prepared, you will have been busy, but will feel as though you worked hard but only accomplished a few or no calls.

If you have a list of leads, do not perform further research on the name or company. You are wasting time on a yet to be qualified lead. Research at this point could allow you to assume what the lead's needs are and your call will have a hidden agenda. You will close yourself to all the possibilities that could exist in that lead's world. Either not having a lead list, or doing pre-determining research, is simply a way of kidding your self.

Commandment VI: Work without Interruptions

We recommend that you not take calls and not entertain meetings during your prospecting time. Take full advantage of the prospecting opportunities and the prospecting learning curve. As with any repetitive discipline, the more often you repeat the discipline during a contiguous block of time, the better you become. Each call you make, the better you become and at some point, as in sports, they call this getting in the groove.

Commandment VII: Consider Prospecting during "Off Peak" Hours

Your competition traditionally does their cold calling between 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM. The gatekeeper is in place and doing their job. Some of your best prospecting work will happen between 7:00 AM and 9:00 AM, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM and between 4:30 PM - 6:00 PM.

Commandment VIII: Vary your Call Times

We are all creatures of habit. So are your prospects. In all likelihood, they are attending the same meeting every Tuesday at 8:30 AM. If you cannot get through at this time, learn from your lack of success and call this particular prospect at other times during the day or on another day. You'll be amazed at the results.

Commandment IX: Be Organized

If you got it use it. I am speaking of your contact management software program. Your contact management program allows you to record a follow up call for tomorrow, next month, next year and even three years out. Log in call efforts, results of conversation and next step, and you will experience a dramatic positive change in your sales life and results.

Commandment X: If You Feel It, Say It!

When a prospect, on the phone, asks you to send them literature, 80-90% of the time they are getting rid of you in a polite way. What would happen if you said, "Many times when someone asks me to send them literature, it is simply a nice way of saying "no" and getting me off the phone. That is not happening now, is it?" If they say, "yes it is,' they disqualified themselves and you are off to the next call. Think of the time and money that was just saved, as well as, avoiding the frustration you experience when you leave voice mail message after voice mail message following up on their "so called" review of your literature.

Commandment Xl: Don't Stop

Persistence is one of the key virtues in selling success.

Commandment XII: Never ever do Anything for a Prospect without Knowing what will Happen as a Result!