As you might imagine, being specialist at cold outreach and new business, we do quite a lot of it for ourselves. We like to think we’re pretty good at handling objections (we should be - it’s pretty much all we do day in, day out!)

One of the most common objections we bump into when prospecting for ourselves is “we don’t need any new business right now. When we need some new clients we’ll start thinking about doing some.”

Makes sense I guess.

However, new business is cold. Very cold. You might occasionally get very lucky and bump into a prospect that turns into some new business relatively quickly, but most of the time it takes months to nurture new contacts and turn an introduction into an actual order.

So if you wait until you NEED new business, you’re then guaranteed (pretty much) a fair wait. That’s the nature of the beast. You’ve got to build your prospect database, decide which avenues you’re going to head down (i.e. email campaigns, LinkedIn reach, networking situations, etc.) and then find the motivation to dive into a cold channel onslaught.

That’s not the kind of thing to do when you NEED it. How about you consider it a constant part of your growth instead? Don’t wait until you need replacement customers, get that slow ball rolling now.

I know I’m making it sounds dreadful but you HAVE to take new business seriously and recognise the challenges it presents if you want growth. You might be awesome and the phone never stops ringing, but that’s not a plan, that’s a prayer.

Take control of New Business while there’s no pressure to succeed. We’ve had calls from previous “no thanks” prospects who tell us “we’ve just lost our biggest client with no warning and need to replace them pronto”. That’s not a healthy cloud to be rolling out a cold campaign under.

Pressure DOES NOT make new business more successful. You don’t wait until you fancy a glass of red wine and THEN plant some grapes. You need to know you’ll need that future result and get in front of it.

I hope that makes sense.

And I now really fancy some red wine. Damn.