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Last weekend a strange man knocked at my front door. It turns out it was a painter named Steve with a unique specialty: painting your home address on the curb in front of your house. Steve wasn’t looking for my business...

In these challenging economic times, sales professionals must meet with senior executives and C-Suite leaders who are empowered to make decisions and allocate budgets. When you consider that CXOs are participating in buying decisions 86% more often than they did just 3 years ago, not targeting them is simply not an option. Yet getting access has become exceptionally difficult as more and more stakeholders are now involved in B2B sales.

It’s easy for sales professionals to get frustrated and lose motivation when selling into a slowing economy. There are many headwinds facing client organizations these days – including recovery from COVID, ongoing recessionary pressures, inflation, budget cuts, supply chain issues, and continued employee turnover.

In prospecting, the only thing worse than not setting a prospecting appointment is setting an appointment with the wrong prospect. Meeting with an unqualified prospect is a huge waste of time and can clog up your sales pipeline with bad opportunities. Increase your odds of prospecting success by only focusing on the most appropriate prospects for your solution. That means defining what the most valuable customer looks like for your company using a “reverse engineering” concept based on specific demographic criteria and certain behavioral characteristics. In marketing lingo, these criteria form an “ideal client profile” or ICP.

Most sales leaders are hyper-focused on increasing the sales team performance and try anything to improve prospecting activities. They look to create more opportunities by adding new tools to the sales stack, retraining the team, automating processes, and even outsourcing meeting acquisition.

Back in the day, sales prospecting was a straightforward activity: 50 calls a day. Today, prospecting has evolved as everyone spends less time talking on the phone. The most notable change is the quantity of prospecting emails sent out by sales teams.