by Will Rotondi
Despite the damage we saw from Hurricane Irma, many thought it would be a lot worse. Nearly two weeks prior our news was inundated with coverage of what happened with Harvey, and we were given plenty of reasons to think this next bout of severe weather was going to be that much more destructive.
Expectation, thankfully, did not meet reality. But then comes the backlash, where people blame the media for overhyping the threat, or think that residents should have stayed put to wait it out. If it had been worse, that backlash would have been from the opposite extreme: Why didn’t you evacuate when you knew what was coming?
There’s a reason we have terms like armchair quarterbacking, or phrases like hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to judge something after the fact.
Think of it like prospecting. You can email all day every day to plenty of companies, and get no response. Your armchair quarterback mentality tells you, Come on, SOMEONE should be reading what I’ve sent. Who doesn’t check their email?
You might feel this way because you’re looking at prospecting with the skill set of a marketer or sales rep, just like the average citizen who has a basic understanding of weather patterns makes a judgment call on a hurricane’s trajectory. You’re more critical of what you don’t know, because you aren’t comfortable with that ambiguity.
Here’s how to make this easier:
- Don’t rely on being a sole prospector. Have a team that can help you reach out to more people in less time and focus on which prospects are a priority based on their electronic behavior.
- Have patience. If your sales cycle is long, your prospecting cycle is likely even longer.
- People need to know you’re real. It’ll take more than an email or two to establish that, which is why you need to be persistent.
A prospect’s journey, from the time you find and verify them until the time they move into your normal sales pipeline, can look something like this:
Given enough effort, your prospecting strategies won’t turn out to be as bad as you may think they are.
