As I peruse my feeds with insights from guru’s, I see all sorts of advice about increasing our outreach. Leveraging tools, ChatGPT, social channels. My various inboxes are filled with with offers for “more.” I am offered lists of thousands of prospects. We are inundated with data showing declining response rates, the solution to these is always “more.” What took 400-500 outreaches a few years ago, takes 1200-1500 today, and next year probably will be over 2500.
As I sit in pipeline reviews, almost universally, the coaching is, “You need more,” followed by demands to 3X, 4X, 9X their pipelines.
As a trained physicist, I know the math works. If you have a 15% win rate, you need almost 7X coverage.
And, somehow, people always make that number. Just slip a few more opportunities into the the qualified pipeline with the justification, “I finally talked to the prospect yesterday!”
I guess it’s my innate laziness. I’ve always found the quantity strategy too much work, even if ChatGPT can write all the prospecting outreaches. People ask me about my prospecting. My personal goal is 6 high impact conversations a week–roughly 300 year. Everyone on our team have goals of 6-12. We are hyper focused on our ICP and who we target within that ICP. Our pipeline coverage goal is a little less than 1.2, we have 92-89% win rates. We have relatively high average deal sizes. Our qualification strategy is not to see how many we can qualify, rather we focus on vicious disqualification. I suspect this contributes to our higher win rates.
To me, the simplest way to drive performance is through a vicious focus on quality. Rather than chasing more, we focus on chasing better.
In this quest for quality, we focus first on win rates. Win rates are a very easy fix, we can help double win rates within 90 days, just through purging pipelines of crappy deals. Not having to waste time on these deals enables sellers to focus on those deals that are the right deals with customers highly motivated to change. And since fewer qualified deals are needed to achieve goals, this dramatically changes the volume of prospecting needed. Sellers are able to narrow their focus, looking for the right people/organizations for outreach, carefully customizing the outreach to them. And through this higher percentages of targets respond. We now have the time to change the mode of prospecting, engaging them through higher impact channels, rather than getting lost in spam filters (regardless how tailored the message.)
We are each limited by time. We only have a maximum of 7×24 that we can invest. Even with technology helping us, ultimately we are limited by time. Producing more in each hour we invest is more impacted by the quality of what we do in each hour, than the volume of what we do.
What would happen if you started shifting your focus from more to focusing on better?
Afterword: Here is another fascinating AI generated discussion of the post! Enjoy!
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