You Might Actually Have a Prospecting Problem
You don't have a prospectin... Ok, you might have a prospecting problem.
Six weeks ago, I told you that most sales leaders default to the hardest channel first. Confusing the channel you have the most control over with the most effective channel is one of the most expensive mistakes a sales team can make.
I meant it. I still mean it.
But here's what's also true: the warmer channels are not infinite. At some point, expansion plateaus. Referrals slow down. The network gets quieter. The inbound flywheel is still spinning up. And the pipeline still needs to be fed.
That's when prospecting stops being the default and becomes a deliberate choice.
That distinction matters more than most leaders realize.
What Bad Looks Like
What’s worse than low volume is high volume without intention behind it.
It looks like a team that has committed to the activity without thinking about what they're doing while they do it.
Sequences are running. Emails are sent. Calls are being made. The CRM is full of touches that look like effort, but produce nothing worth measuring.
The automation does the work, the thinking doesn't happen, and because the activity metrics look fine, nobody stops to ask why the results don't match.
That's not a prospecting problem. It’s plausible deniability. It's a thinking problem that happens to show up in the prospecting numbers.
What Good Looks Like
Good prospecting is intentional, specific, and treated like a craft.
Years ago, I wrote a book called The Five Forgotten Fundamentals of Prospecting (hit me up and I’ll send you the pdf). They apply across every channel in this series, but they show up most visibly in cold outreach where there's no existing relationship to fall back on and every word has to earn its place.
They're worth knowing as a diagnostic lens.
Does your team know what they specifically bring to the table for this prospect?
Do they know exactly who they should be talking to, and why?
Are they creating enough tension to make the cost of inaction real?
Are they showing up as experts with a point of view, not just messengers with a pitch?
And are they doing all of it with the quiet confidence that comes from knowing why they win?
When those five things are present, prospecting works. When they're absent, volume is just noise.
How to Integrate It
The leader's job here isn't to run the sequences. It's to create the conditions where intentional prospecting can happen.
That means being clear on who the team should be talking to and why. It means coaching the quality of the outreach, not just the quantity. It means listening to calls: not to critique the script but to hear whether the rep sounds like someone worth talking to.
It also means protecting your team's belief. Prospecting is the hardest channel for a reason. Rejection is constant and cumulative. When the swagger starts to drain out of the team (this looks like apologizing for calling, hedging their value, giving up too early), that's the signal.
This is more of a belief problem than a training problem, and team belief is a leadership responsibility.
The Close
Prospecting works when everything else is also working. When your team knows why they win, who they're best suited to help, and what they bring to a conversation, cold outreach stops being a grind and becomes a tool.
Prospecting isn’t the answer itself, but it's part of the answer, and it's most effective when it's the last channel you reach for, not the first.
You might actually have a prospecting problem.
But now you know what to do about it.
