- Always Be Prospecting –
- This is #1 activity you can spend your time doing as an incoming business development consultant, sales development representative, account executive or whatever you want to call it. Some of your biggest wins will come from prospecting and building a pipeline that can withstand the ups and downs of the business cycle. Try to focus on consistently making 20 new connections per day. This can be in the form of cold calls/cold e-mails and one of my all-time-favorites, LinkedIn. At 5 minutes avg. spent per connection this gives you about 2 hours/day in prospecting. Most sales agents I’ve seen barely do that in a week. “Little and often pays the bills”
- Learn About Company –
- Learning about how the company operates, typical sales cycles, product features & benefits, company tools & logins. This should take no longer than 1 week. I’ve seen this taking 2 months in some cases. Today, I just got asked where our “New Client Questionnaire” from an agent who’s been with us 7 months now…Don’t be that guy.
- Build “Activity” Goals –
- Look, I’ve seen many systems implemented. Most of the times I see no systems, but when I do it’s a half-hearted attempt at tracking goals and indicators of success. The simplest way to look at your progress your 1st year is tracking daily/weekly/monthly “activity” goals. These include but are not limited to: Calls, Appointments, Inbound Leads, Cold E-mails, Opportunities, Pipeline Value. You can get as granular as you like but for starters I would start with the above as this will give you 90% of what you need to focus on and grow. And as Peter Drucker likes to say, “What gets measured gets managed”.
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