This is a tough love article.
Fact: Your fear of missing out is killing your lead generation.
3 keys to avoiding this trap below.
When it comes to prospecting, too much FOMO leads to…
NEGLECT of your highest probability-highest value prospects.
MISALLOCATION OF RESOURCES (Time and money,) into low-probability and lottery ticket land.
WATERS DOWN YOUR EFFECTIVENESS as you neglect sorting and coding, and proper allocation of your time to your very best most probable buyers.
Your probability of success is largely determined before you make your first call or send your first email. If your list is overly broad because you don’t want to miss anyone or you say to yourself “Hey, we have found some good clients in that crap pile, you never know,” you have pretty much immolated yourself before you start.
I see FOMO grab defeat from the jaws of victory primarily two ways:
1. Programs start with way more records than they can work,the records are not prioritized by potential value or probability of sale. So way too much time is spent in low-probability land.
2. Existing programs over time have let the size of their databases explode in size far beyond their capacity to prospect and resist prioritizing and absolutely refuse to delete the crappiest, have no clue where it came from, no clue as to its value and we haven’t called it for 4 years records.
Rationalizations are awe-inspiring. Be aggressive.
The mental gymnastics and rationalizations used to justify keeping crap and junk in a database are awe-inspiring. If these reps/managers were half as effective convincing prospects to meet as they are convincing themselves they can turn crap into gold, they would have no prospecting problems.
So how do you keep FOMO from killing your lead generation?
1. When you are starting a program ,your list should not contain more records than you can work well over two months or so. Don’t spend your money or presuppose who will respond before you have done some reasonable testing.
2. If you have an existing program, you must be aggressive in periodically weeding out lower probability and lower potential groups of records, particularly if they have been sitting in your database for years untouched. Many companies have far more really good records to call than they have time or resources to work. Keeping these records in your database seriously dilutes your attention to higher-probability records and wastes tons of time.
3. You must prioritize and segment as you go so that you can prioritize groups of records by their potential value and probability of success. I tend to like an A, B, C, D, E coding system. A is the best, C is average, E is toxic crap. If you do this, you will have more confidence in deciding what is not worthwhile. Plus, when you have a ton of great records to call it gives you more confidence to throw out the garbage.
FOMO kills lead gen.
Be aware of it and fight it so that you have a much higher probability of success.
