Welcome to the Finding Business podcast. Five minutes that will help you learn something new about attracting ideal clients and accounts. I’m your host, Scott Channell. For more about this show, episodes, and services offered, go to Scott Channell — with two t’s, two n’s, and two l’s — dot com. Now, on to the show.
Your sales numbers are down. So what do you do?
You do more. More dials. More emails. Try harder. It is the one lever you always have and nobody will argue with it. Well, almost nobody.
Effort is honest. Effort is under your control. And when you are behind, doing more feels like the only responsible answer.
I want to take that apart.
Start with what you actually learn from a week of prospecting.
You made your calls. Some went nowhere. A few went somewhere. Did the good ones happen because of your opener, your credibility and benefit statement, your targeting, or due to randomness?
You do not know. Most of the time you cannot know.
And when real feedback does show up, it shows up late. You change your target list and scripting in January. The meetings that turn into revenue land in spring. By then your list changed again, your script changed, two competitors made major moves, and a budget cycle came and went.
Something worked. Good luck determining what it was.
So here you are. Working inside a process where the feedback shows up weeks or months late, if it shows up at all. And by the time it does, so much has changed that you cannot tell what to keep doing and what to stop.
What do most reach for?
The things that are easy to count.
Dials. Emails. Meetings booked. Activity is visible. Activity is measurable. Activity feels like progress on a day when nothing else does.
Whether any of it connects to a result is a separate question. That question rarely gets asked.
Sometimes it works anyway. You make enough calls, you hit somebody who was ready to buy.
Here is the trap. That result did not prove your approach was right. It proved you got a hit. But nothing tells you what worked and what was randomness, so you conclude the volume did it, and you go do more of it.
I am not telling you to make fewer calls.
I am telling you that once you are making a reasonable number of dials, making more of them is not where your next result comes from. It comes from who is on the other end.
When I was setting appointments, here is the standard I held myself to.
Eighty to eighty-five percent of my activity had to be aimed at high-probability targets. Companies that were close clones of current best accounts. Right size, right industry, right situation, and a reason to believe they might be open to a conversation right now.
Fifteen percent, maybe twenty at the outside, could sit in an unknown zone. But I knew exactly which records those were. And every one of them had a plan attached. Either I did the recon to move it into the high-probability group, or I labeled it low value, or I threw it out.
That is the whole discipline. Not more calls. Better decisions about where the calls go.
And notice what it does for you. That standard is something you can check today. Right now. Pull up your list and ask what percentage of it fits the profile of your best existing accounts.
You do not need to wait for a deal to close to know whether you are doing this right. You do not need feedback from a process that is not going to give you much.
The judgment happens before the activity does.
Here is what I want you to do this week.
Take twenty-five accounts you would want to clone. Look at what they have in common. Industry codes, revenue range, employee count. Then ask how many records on your list actually look like them.
If the answer is most of them, make your calls and go get it.
If the answer is not many, more dials will never fix that.
