11 ways to motivate yourself to prospect for new clients
Everyone needs new accounts. It’s often part of your compensation plan. Your firm might define success as new, not repeat business. Most people…
Everyone needs new accounts. It’s often part of your compensation plan. Your firm might define success as new, not repeat business. Most people don’t list prospecting as the favorite part of their job. How do you motivate yourself to prospect?
Has the pandemic lockdown changed the rules? Has working from home given you a free pass, exempted you from prospecting for a year? No. Your manager still has expectations.
Here are 11 tips for motivating yourself to prospect.
1. Prospecting is a daily activity. Everyone would agree it’s an important part of growing your business. It’s tempting to put it off Monday through Thursday with the expectation Friday will be eight hours of solid prospecting. You will find a reason not to come to work on Friday. Spread it out through the week.
2. Prospecting isn’t just for rookies. It’s often considered a “rite of passage.” You get it done during your first couple of years in the business, then it’s (thankfully) behind you. Your book of clients is gradually getting smaller through attrition. Most established successful advisors have a plan to add new accounts.
3. Prospecting is like roulette. It’s easy to get discouraged. Suppose you were making phone calls. Six calls all got voicemail. Even worse, six calls all got hang ups. It’s easy to sense a trend, assuming the seventh call will be the same. However, each call is a separate instance, unrelated to the outcome of past calls. Even if the roulette wheel came up red on the last six spins, the odds of it coming up black on the seventh spin are about 50/50.
4. Define a time. Prospecting shouldn’t be an all-day activity. That would be grim. Build a template for your daily plan. Build in time for at least an hour of prospecting.
5. Get it done early. It’s human nature to delay activities we don’t like doing. On the other hand, children rush down the steps on Christmas morning, ready to open presents. Let’s suppose, as an experienced agent, your plan is to prospect for an hour every day. Build it in as your first activity. You are fresh. You are in a good mood. The same goes for your prospect. Nothing has happened yet to ruin their day.
6. Get away from distractions. We look for any reason to avoid activities we don’t like. We get easily distracted. Only focus on the task at hand. In your office, swap desks with a friend. Tell those around you not to disturb you for the next hour. They can truthfully say you are behind closed doors.
7. Get into a rhythm. Prospecting could be described mindless work. Maybe a task that doesn’t require lots of thought. That sounds harsh, but it’s a benefit in disguise. You might think of reasons to avoid it, but once you are doing it, the flow gets going quickly. Suppose you are responding to messages, likes and comments on LinkedIn. Just focus on the project. You will start to knock out lots of messages or calls.
8. Track progress in many ways. It’s depressing to measure success only in terms of ringing the cash register. You can make great progress, yet not close any business that day. Find several metrics to measure based on the actions you take. Using calling as an example, there are dials, people reached, people interested, appointment and sales. Regardless of the system you use, you are planting seeds.
9. Follow up counts. Calling someone back, answering their questions of keeping them interested also counts as progress. Many factors contribute to a prospect becoming a client. Give yourself credit for them all.
10. Reward yourself. You’ve heard of diets that have “cheat days.” The concept is you stick to a regimen six days a week, relaxing the rules on the seventh day. If you have been sticking to your routine throughout the week, why not treat yourself well on the weekend? Designing and delivering your own weekend rewards keeps you motivated through the workweek.
11. Strive to continuously improve. It’s been said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Look at it from the viewpoint of incremental improvement. You post to LinkedIn. Sometimes your posts get attention, other times they don’t. Try varying the time of day. What topics did better than others? Vary your process based on what you’ve learned.
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