Quick Summary
To prospect for new clients, stop making random touches and run a consistent five-step system: build your ideal customer profile (ICP), build targeted prospecting lists with intention, work those lists through multi-channel prospecting sequences, engage prospects with relevant because statements, and protect daily prospecting blocks on your calendar. Randomness is the enemy of effectiveness. Work this system every day and you gain control of your pipeline, along with the peace of mind that you’ll have the coverage to hit your number.
Key Takeaways: How to Prospect for New Clients
- Randomness is the enemy of effectiveness.
- Targeted lists beat big lists.
- Build your ideal customer profile (ICP) before you make a single touch.
- On average, it takes between 8 and 11 touches to get meaningful engagement, so run planned multi-channel sequences.
- Start every sequence with the phone or an in-person visit. A real human cuts through the AI noise.
- People agree to meet for their reasons, not yours.
- Lead every touch with a relevant because statement.
- Protect daily prospecting blocks and let nothing interfere with them.
- Consistency beats intensity. The more people you talk with, the more you will sell.
Prospecting for New Clients Should Not Be Like Scratching Lottery Tickets
Early in my career, I prospected like I was scratching lottery tickets. Grab a name, send an email, make a call, and hope. It didn’t work very well. I spent a lot of time talking to the wrong people and got pounded with rejection. Prospecting was already hard, but the way I was doing it made it miserable.
Everything shifted for me when I adopted the Fanatical Prospecting system. I stopped randomly chasing any potential customer and started targeting the right prospects, based on my ideal customer profile (ICP), with relevant because statements. That one change made a massive difference in my prospecting outcomes. I set more meetings with less pushback.
These days, prospecting is even more challenging than when I started. In today’s world, your prospects are drowning in AI-written slop. Decision maker inboxes are a dumpster fire of automated cold emails that all sound the same, because they all came out of the same machine. You see, the same AI that is writing your automated cold emails is also writing for your competitors, which is one of the big reasons that it all sounds just alike and your prospects ignore it.
The good news is that the bar for standing out has never been lower. A real human, targeting the right prospects, with a relevant reason for reaching out is so rare these days that when you do it, prospects pay attention and you put new opportunities in your pipeline. And when you call or walk through their door rather than just email, you really stand out.
There is a better way. It’s running a consistent five-step system that puts you in control of your pipeline, helps you find new clients, and gives you peace of mind that you’ll have the pipeline coverage to hit your number.
Step One: Build Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
As Jeb Blount, Sr., author of Fanatical Prospecting, always says, “Randomness is the enemy of effectiveness.”
Spray and pray is a very poor strategy for landing new customers. Precision will give you a much higher return on your time investment. Therefore, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Start by pulling up your last ten wins and study the prospects that understood your value and advanced smoothly to the close.
- What industry are they in?
- What size?
- What title signed the deal?
- What problem pushed them to act?
- Why did they choose you vs competitors?
- What were the green lights that signaled to keep advancing?
The ICP development process is much deeper than the handful of questions above. However, the answers to these questions are a good beginning that will help you get more targeted in your new client prospecting approach.
A clearly defined ICP ensures that you are targeting the right prospects and personas (role types), at the right time, with the right message. This clarity significantly enhances your prospecting outcomes.
It is also much easier to craft effective, tailored prospecting messages that connect, engage, and convert when you are focused on a specific ICP.
Pro tip: For more help with developing your ICP, explore our live workshop catalog for upcoming Targeted Prospecting and Ideal Customer Profile instructor-led workshops.
Step Two: Build Prospecting Lists With Intention
It is a fact that with better prospecting lists, you’ll generate better prospecting outcomes. Sadly, many of the salespeople I coach enter prospecting blocks scrambling for someone to call.
So, rather than actually prospecting, they peck away inside their CRM, scroll through (and get lost in) LinkedIn, hunt on Google, and maybe ask AI.
The absolute worst time to start building a prospecting list is when your pipeline is already empty. In your desperation to fix your pipeline problem you become overwhelmed, frustrated, and irrational. It’s hard to know where to start. You end up doing tons of research but very little prospecting.
Do this instead: Block thirty minutes each day for research and list building. Build lists from your CRM’s dead-deal graveyard, inactive customers, customer look-alikes, networking, referrals, ZoomInfo, trade associations, LinkedIn, inbound leads, and the accounts you drive past in your territory. This steady, consistent, intentional list building process keeps your lists fresh and ensures that your scheduled prospecting blocks are highly productive.
Step Three: Run a Multi-Channel Prospecting Sequence
As you learned above, AI noise is making it much more challenging to get through to new prospects and be heard. These days, on average, it takes between 8 and 11 touches to get any meaningful engagement. For this reason, the sales professionals who are building strong pipelines are using multi-touch Fanatical Prospecting sequences.
A prospecting sequence is a planned series of touches, in a set order, over a set number of days, weeks, or months.
- Call. Leave a voicemail.
- Send an email that references the voicemail.
- Connect on LinkedIn.
- Call again.
- Walk through the door if you’re a field seller.
- Send a video.
- Send snail mail.
Each touch makes the next one warmer because you are building familiarity and familiarity lowers resistance.
And here’s another pro tip: start your sequence with the phone or an in-person prospecting visit. While the AI slop piles up unread in your prospect’s inbox, a live human voice stands out.
Step Four: Develop and Use Relevant Because Statements
What must never be forgotten is that people agree to meet with you for their reasons, not yours. This is why you need to develop relevant messages (at Sales Gravy we call these Because Statements) that explain the specific reason your prospect should give you their time and attention.
Relevance is what separates you from the slop. Relevant means that your message is about their situation, not a pitch about your company.
Developing relevant messaging is the most challenging part of the prospecting equation because it requires you to step into your prospect’s shoes and view things from their perspective.
When your messaging is relevant and connects, you’ll get fewer objections, more meaningful conversations, and set many more appointments. This is why we spend much of our time in Fanatical Prospecting Bootcamps helping participants develop, hone, and deepen their because statements.
One important rule: There is no doubt that AI can help you with prospecting messaging. However, you must humanize anything AI writes for you before saying or sending it to a new prospect.
Step Five: Set Protected Daily Prospecting Blocks on Your Calendar
The number one reason salespeople fail to bring in new clients is that they are not prospecting consistently every day. Instead, they engage in random acts of prospecting. A flurry of calls one week when the pipeline is getting thin, then nothing for a month while they work the few opportunities they scared up in their panic.
This feast or famine pattern is hard to sustain over the long haul and can create gut-wrenching emotional ups and downs.
Consistency beats intensity. Twenty focused touches a day, five days a week, outperforms a hundred panicked dials at the end of the month. It’s called the law of cumulative impact. When you prospect each day, it adds up and your pipeline stays full.
The key is putting a daily prospecting call block on your calendar, first thing in the morning when you’re fresh, and defending it like a client meeting. No email. No research either (that’s what your Step Two list building block is for). No CRM housekeeping. Just your targeted list and your phone.
Then calendar an additional prospecting block in the afternoon for email, direct messaging, and LinkedIn prospecting.
Keep your prospecting blocks sacred and let nothing interfere with them. Work this system for 90 days and the feast or famine pipeline panic goes away. You stop chasing bad-fit deals out of desperation and you walk into every month with the pipeline coverage to hit your number and the peace of mind that comes with it.
You’ll be amazed at how quickly your pipeline grows. As we say here at Sales Gravy, “the pipe is life!”
Start measuring the real-time metrics that fill your pipeline. Download the official Fanatical Prospecting tracking system designed to help you maintain the discipline required to turn prospecting blocks into qualified pipeline.
Common Questions Salespeople Ask About Prospecting for New Clients
Prospecting is the discipline of proactively finding, engaging, and qualifying potential new customers to keep your pipeline full. It includes identifying prospects who match your ideal customer profile, building lists, and reaching out through calls, email, LinkedIn, and in-person visits until you set a meeting. Prospecting is the first step of the sales process and the activity that feeds everything downstream.
The best way to prospect for new clients is to work a consistent system instead of making random touches: build your ideal customer profile (ICP), build targeted prospecting lists with intention, work those lists through multi-channel sequences, lead every touch with a relevant because statement, and prospect every day in protected time blocks. Salespeople who run this system control their pipelines. Salespeople who prospect randomly ride the feast or famine rollercoaster.
Strong sources include your CRM’s dead-deal graveyard, inactive customers, look-alikes of your best customers, networking, referrals, sales intelligence tools like ZoomInfo, trade associations, LinkedIn, inbound leads, and the accounts in your own territory. Block thirty minutes each day for research and list building so your lists stay fresh and you never enter a prospecting block scrambling for someone to call.
On average, it takes between 8 and 11 touches to get meaningful engagement from a new prospect. Most salespeople quit after one or two attempts, which is exactly why planned, multi-touch prospecting sequences win. Each call, voicemail, email, LinkedIn touch, video, and in-person visit builds familiarity, and familiarity lowers resistance.
Jeb Blount developed the concept of “Because Statements” that he teaches in Fanatical Prospecting®. A because statement is the specific, relevant reason a prospect should give you their time and attention. People agree to meetings for their reasons, not yours, so an effective because statement is about the prospect and their situation, never a pitch about you and your company. Relevant because statements generate fewer objections, more meaningful conversations, and more appointments.
AI can help you research prospects and draft messaging, but you must humanize anything AI writes before saying or sending it. Decision maker inboxes are flooded with automated, AI-written outreach that all sounds the same, so a message that reads like a machine gets ignored. Relevance and a human voice are what make prospects pay attention.
Put a prospecting call block on your calendar first thing in the morning when you’re fresh, then a second block in the afternoon for email, direct messaging, and LinkedIn prospecting. Defend both like client meetings and let nothing interfere with them. Daily consistency beats occasional marathon sessions because of the law of cumulative impact: prospect every day and your pipeline stays full.
Protect your daily prospecting blocks no matter how busy you get. The feast or famine cycle starts when salespeople stop prospecting to work the deals and customers in front of them, and the price is an empty pipeline a month later. Serve your customers with the rest of your day, but treat prospecting time as sacred.
Related article: Beat Sales Call Reluctance and Get Back to Fanatical Prospecting
Related e-learning: How to Balance Prospecting With Account Management
