Focus and consistency

Hunting is a laborious affair. A hunter constantly has to deal with rejection. Approaching unfamiliar people and initiating a conversation, be it on the phone or in person, requires resilience. To be successful with our buyers also requires honesty and candor—the senior executives will see through all your “pretend knowledge” of their problems.

Structuring your day helps with consistency and results over time. I mentioned before that it takes up to twelve touchpoints to really make progress with a prospect—you have to persist and keep up momentum, even after eleven consecutive unsuccessful touchpoints. Your mind-set matters—you have to genuinely believe in the value of our services. And be patient! Because of the long enterprise sales cycle, some of your pursuits could span over a year. But let’s get to the daily schedule.

• 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Cold-call and follow up. Executives tend to be early birds. Place cold calls in the morning for the optimum timing (i.e., start with EST, then work to PST). Research the company, the industry, find nuggets of sharable information. Get in the habit or preparing your target list ahead of time, call twenty to forty of them, leave voicemails, send emails and LinkedIn messages to follow up immediately after the fact.
• 9:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Research and refine prospects. Burned out from cold-calling? Give your brain a break. Read the news and scan for information relevant to your top prospects. Use industry articles, case studies, and white papers to identify market trends and the latest insights. Look for events to attend in your area that could be good opportunities to connect with prospects. Check the recent activities for each prospect/opportunity in the database. If the prospect is languishing, make a note to reach out. Call upon the content (either material you’ve just read or Devbridge produced) relevant to the prospect to use as bait.
• 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Network. Get out and meet people. Midday is a good time for networking because there’s usually a “lunch and learn,” an executive club meeting, or a peer meetup somewhere. Hit the hardest when you’re not in the office. Legwork pays off—mostly because no one else does it. When was the last time you dropped off a box of treats for your top prospect?
• 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Review engagement reports. Each email should be reaching its recipient (and being opened). Assess who opened the email and follow up with a quick call. If they didn’t open an email, consider calling as a means to draw the prospects attention to the material. Now is also the time to execute any pending outbound campaigns, send LinkedIn messages, emails, etc.

And we do actually have managing directors show up at prospects’ offices with a box of donuts. No sleazy sale—just a “Hi, thought you should know of us. Enjoy the donuts!” How many times have you had someone do that? You would remember, and that’s the point.

This schedule is obviously just a baseline that I’ve found to work for me—adjust according to your own style. Also consider the day of week. Monday is usually a bad day for cold outreach because everyone is catching up after the weekend; Tuesdays and Thursdays are great. Log all of your activity in Salesforce so that you can determine patterns of what has worked and what hasn’t.