Your prospects are now doing more with less. They’re doing the job of several people and are more stressed out than ever and that means that prospects are much less easily reached than ever before.

Prospects are also less willing to engage; it’s a nightmare, they can find a lot of what they need on the Internet.

Is this your experience too? Are you struggling more now to fill your sales funnel? Are you wondering where your next customers are coming from? Is this completely stressing you out?

Stress no longer!

There’s a well known rule in sales (and in business) called Pareto’s law. It’s also known as the 80/20 rule.

It works like this:

• You will get 80% of your sales revenue from 20% of your customers
• 20% of your sales team will bring in 80% of your sales revenue
• 80% of your sales team will bring in the remaining 20% of the sales revenue

This rule applies throughout business too:

• 80% of productivity will come from 20% of the employees
• 80% of problems will come from 20% of customers
• And so on…

Pareto’s law can be applied to prospecting as well. If you’re new to sales and need to develop your pipeline, then you should be spending 80% of your time prospecting. Once you have a full sales funnel (and if you’ve done this consistently for 3-6 months, you should). After that you need to be spending 20% of your time prospecting.

Here’s where the problem lies of course, most new sales people or business owners don’t spend that 80% of time up front building their sales funnel. And then they don’t spend that 20% of time consistently ensuring their funnel stays full.

That is why so many sales professionals, entrepreneurs and business owners struggle. That’s why so many experience that ‘boom and bust’ cycle. They have no business in the pipeline they panic and frantically start prospecting. They get a few new customers, feel safe again and stop. Then those projects are done and there’s nothing in the pipeline…so guess what? Yep, they panic and start frantically prospecting again.

The key to never, ever having to experience ‘boom and bust’ is to prospect consistently, every day, no matter what, you need to make time or outsource it.

A sales funnel can be developed in many ways, e.g.:

• Cold calling
• Networking
• Referral selling
• Social media

The important point is that no matter what else is going on with you or in your business you take the time to look for new business every single day.

If you need more help building your pipeline, then contact me today.