Green Zone Selling

The 25 Percent Rule

Nearly every salesperson that is not making enough money is not making enough sales contacts. From my research, the average-performing salesperson spends from 5 percent to 10 percent of his or her time “prospecting” for business while the typical top producer invests over twice that amount engaged in prospecting, marketing, networking, and follow-up activities. (See a pattern here?)

Want more sales? As a fundamental rule, you should allocate a minimum of 25 percent of your time engaged in some form of proactive prospecting. That means if you work a typical eight hour day and 40 hour week, you should invest, on average, two hours a day and ten hours a week looking for new customers and more sales. If that’s what you are doing now, you likely have the results to show for it. If that’s not what you are doing now, it is likely you are not closing enough sales.

First, let’s define prospecting. Prospecting is what you do to find a customer. It’s not answering questions, writing up contracts or servicing your existing customer’s accounts. Prospecting is all about finding the next customer and another sales opportunity. Common prospecting activities for most salespeople include:

Making out-bound phone calls

Trying to set up new appointments

Mailing out letters, flyers, offers and marketing materials

Placing ads

Sending out solicitation emails

Attending networking functions

Following up on leads

Contacting customers about repeat business

Phoning good clients and asking for their referrals

Are you investing at least two hours each day engaged in these types of activities? You should be. Those salespeople that spend more time looking for more customers and more sales always (repeat: always) find more customers and make more sales. (In the last ten thousand years of selling it has always been thus!)

Second, let’s talk about planning to prospect. How does prospecting fit into your daily routine? Is it an important activity? If you view prospecting as a “left-over time” activity or a dreaded chore, you’ll rarely if ever find time to do it.

Prospecting is important to your sales growth and needs to be a priority on your To-Do List. Perhaps you have heard of terms like Time Blocking, Time Mapping, or as I like to teach it: Time Framing. Essentially, this is the practice of protecting pieces of time for important things in your job—like prospecting. For example, if you worked a 40-hour week and were to commit 25 percent of your time for prospecting activities on a weekly basis, you could:

Frame 2 hours each day on your calendar, from 10 am to noon, as time dedicated for your prospecting activities or…

Frame 4 hours on Monday afternoon, 3 hours on Wednesday afternoon and 3 hours on Friday afternoon for prospecting or…

Frame all day Tuesday and all of Thursday morning for prospecting

Try out this concept. Work it however it works for you . Just be sure at least 25 percent of your time is allocated and dedicated to prospecting for more sales. This is how top producing salespeople make sure their important prospecting activities get done…and keep getting done week after week and month after month .

There is little argument for the statement that prospecting is the single biggest activity that drives new customers and more sales opportunities in the door. And above everything else, isn’t this what you are in business to do?