This week I leave for Chicago to join other sales leaders for a half day summit with speakers like Jill Konrath, Trish Bertuzzi, Colleen Stanley, Jeanette Nydenm, and Bernadette McCellland.  I'm honored to be on the panel discussion with Nancy Bleeke, Alice Heiman and Kendra Lee answering questions about prospecting. 

We got several great questions in that we need to answer about prospecting, including;

• What is the most cost effective leads generation approach and process in a cold calling sales environment?
• What is the best method today for prospecting a cold list?
• I hate prospecting. What are some good strategies/tools for shortening your prospecting time, and more quickly zeroing in on the right contacts?
• How can you encourage reps to prospect while making the best use of time management?
• How do we encourage our sales people to be more creative and entrepreneurial?

We also asked sales executives to share what their #1 goal over the next 12 months was. Here is what some of them shared:

• Revenue (this was mentioned more than once.)
• Grow prospecting skills
• Expand social selling
• Embrace new technologies

Prospecting in the age of the buyer.

Given those questions, here are a few points about prospecting today to consider: 

1. "It's the cold that's dead, not the call." ~Trish Bertuzzi.
   A lot of these questions, and articles that are out on the web reference cold calling. Yuck. No wonder salespeople hate prospecting. I would too. That's why I don't do cold calls. But as Joanne Black says, I do "pick up the damn phone." But much of my prospecting activity is spent before the call- whether it is sending them relevant content, asking questions leading up to the call, or interacting on social media. The engagement doesn't start and end with the phone, but it does include it.
2. "Be in the places where your best prospects are."
   To make the best use of your time, know where (your) people go at each stage of their buying process. For example, if you are trying to create opportunities at the top of the funnel, and know which blogs they read as they try to educate themselves, go there and make an insightful comment with a link back to your LinkedIn profile. (Get our LinkedIn eBook for more tips like this.)
3. "If you can't trust a salesperson to create content that's relevant, how can you trust them to represent your brand on the phone or in meetings?"
   To enable salespeople to be more creative and be more entrepreneurial, we must give them the reigns to do so. Hire for attitude and mindset- the "whatever it takes" salesperson will use any technology and tool available to them to connect with potential prospects and buyers. And instead of assigning a quota, what if we helped salespeople set realistic financial goals that aligned to the activity goals that helped them reach their own personal ambitions? Would the entrepreneurs thrive?

Prospecting today is as much about being efficient with our time as it is about being effective. Doing more and faster does not always lead to results. If you automate crappy sales techniques, you will still get crappy results.

Just measuring activity is not enough- activity must be tied to outcome and time metrics. There are only so many hours in a day- which activities lead to the most contacts, opportunities and closed sales? How much time do those activities take? How many can a salesperson be expected to realistically do?

How would you answer these questions? What are your prospecting questions? What is your focus on in 2016?