Work hard. It’s the smart thing to do.

In a few months, there is a good chance you’ll be looking back to the 4th quarter of 2022 and wishing you had prospected more. That is, you’ll wish you had worked harder to locate more sales opportunities to replace the lost business you’ll experience in the coming months.

Of course, it is always a good time to prospect. However, the unusual factors of the past few years have enabled salespeople to put off this ultimately necessary task.

In fact, some salespeople became very reluctant to prospect for fear they couldn’t fulfill demand. Product shortages combined with escalating demand and rising prices created a rabid sellers’ market where growth came easily, albeit in a chaotic environment.

Sound familiar? I remember standing at a jobsite in 2004 after OSB had “skyrocketed” from

$7 per sheet to $25 (Ah, the good old days…). The builder yelled in disgust while, at the same time, asking to be allocated some of the scarce resource. It was the last time we saw a market as heated as the recent one.

At the time, I had just launched my journalistic career and wrote, in the second article I had ever published, that prospecting (yes, in 2004) is the key to success. I offered five tips to support my thesis:

1. Write a phone script. Sadly, our industry employs some salespeople who have managed to endure through a career without any intensive prospecting effort. They are the salesperson at the branch who has been handed enough accounts to sustain a steady salary. True sales leadership requires the ability to sell from scratch, which is to take a potential buyer from a cold call to full engagement over the course of many interactions.

2. Pick up the phone. Don’t think about it. Forget planning. Ignore your list. Just pick up the phone and call one person. The first call is the hardest. After the first one, your momentum builds.

3. Play a rating game. Evaluate the “temperature” of each lead. If you get buyers willing to take a price, but unwilling to meet, they are merely suspects rather than true prospects. A prospect is a potential buyer who has engaged in a quality dialogue to which you can ascribe a tangible value.

4. Count your calendar. Sick of pop-ins from reps who show up with no agenda and waste time making small talk? If so, then don’t do it to your customers. Count the number of appointments you can schedule in a week; phone calls and virtual meetings count. The more quality interactions with prospects you have, the greater your chances for success.

5. Resurrect old leads and accounts. I don’t need to see your customer list. It is a mirror image of every LBM dealer list in our industry. Your top accounts give you 90% of your business. The bottom 75% of your accounts bought very little from you last year. It’s time to start culling those names and determining which are dead ends versus accounts to be resurrected.

Prospecting will never be an urgent task that your customers demand of you. They will never say, “You probably should worry about my future business and start looking to replace me down the road.” Prospecting is a constant priority that requires proactive time allocation. It’s not fancy. It’s just hard work, the smart thing to do in a precarious market and for all time.

Rick Davis is the Sales Education Leader for ABC Supply and the President of Building Leaders. You can buy his books or learn more about his online sales training platform at buildingleaders.com.