Have you ever felt that spike in anxiety and fear when you are about to cold-contact a business to ask for time to talk about your product? Do you feel the same way whether it’s sending emails, cold calling or knocking on doors? Let’s talk about how to move past this resistance and on to finding ways to keep your sales funnel full.
Filling up your funnel with prospects is a crucial component to your sales process. The more prospects you have, the more chances you’ll have to close sales. If you let your anxiety turn prospecting into a hated chore, you are setting yourself up for failure. Prospecting can be a rollercoaster ride of emotions and you will need grit to get through both the highs and the lows.
How can you turn prospecting into a passionate part of the sales process that you are in love with? Combating anxiety is simple, but it takes work. The best way to get rid of anxiety is to expose yourself to the thing that causes you anxiety. Simple right? Of course, you should be strategic here because if your actions start to cause positive results you will be even more motivated to continue.
The key is to create habits that will consistently lead to results so you can turn that fear into love. Next are some tips to help you build these habits.
Schedule Prospecting Time
The most important thing that you can do to keep your sales funnel full is to make prospecting part of your daily or weekly routine. This could mean blocking sections of your calendar so you can dedicate time to cold calls or visits. These blocks of time can be tied to activities such as “make 100 calls” or “visit 5 potential clients”.
This is helpful because it creates a consistent flow and it also removes you from making a decision to cold call that might otherwise be easy to put off.
Make Prospecting Fun
Gamify your prospecting by turning the process into a competition. Do you have a competitive friend in the office? Set up a cold call challenge. Finding a way to make it fun will help you stay motivated.
Use a Customer Relationship Management System (CRM)
Attempting to rely on your memory alone to keep track of your prospects is not a great idea. It’s far too easy to forget important details that could lead you to a sale later on. It’s better to write it down.
Better yet, you may want to keep track of your prospects using a Customer Relationship Management system or CRM. This is an app that you can use to keep track of prospects, mine data on your sales cycle, and understand your pipeline. These insights can help you optimize your funnel, leading to results and even more motivation to keep at prospecting. In our company, we’ve seen a major value in equipping our agents with a proprietary CRM that helps them to stay as efficient as possible, while optimizing their rate of success. Find out more about how they’re winning here.
Fall In Love With The Process
Use these tools to manage your funnel and get measurable results. As you do this, your anxiety will lessen. Then, as you seen how filling your funnel leads to results, you will start to become passionate about the entire sales process, including cold calls.
