7 Key Sales Prospecting Mistakes You Might Be Making, According to Experts

7 Key Sales Prospecting Mistakes You Might Be Making, According to Experts

Successfully executing a sales process is a lot like growing a flower, and in the context of this half-baked analogy, prospecting is like finding seeds.

If you only find seeds that don't want to be flowers, do shoddy seed research and wind up with seeds that grow the wrong kind of flower, manage to upset the seeds you find by badgering them, try to appeal to seeds too generically, or don't present a compelling enough value proposition for why the seeds you connect with should be flowers, your garden is going to look like trash and you won't hit your flower quota.

Nailed it.

Anyway, this week's edition of The Pipeline covers some key mistakes experts say you need to avoid when prospecting. Check it out!

7 Fatal Sales Prospecting Mistakes You Might Be Making

1. Ignoring Patterns From Past Customers

Marc Hardgrove, CEO of The Hoth, says, "Sales teams waste enormous effort prospecting without studying past customer patterns. While everyone focuses on ideal customer profiles, we started analyzing why certain clients stayed longest with our agency. The surprising pattern wasn't about company size or budget - it was about their internal marketing team structure.

"Companies with dedicated digital marketing managers but no technical SEO specialists became our longest-retained clients. We rebuilt our prospecting criteria around this insight, specifically targeting companies hiring their first marketing manager. Instead of broad outreach, we monitor job boards for these specific hiring patterns.

"Our sales cycle shortened by half because we stopped pursuing prospects who looked good on paper but didn't match our retention pattern. More importantly, our average client lifetime value increased because we focused on companies where we could provide lasting value."

2. Fixating Too Much on Quality at the Expense of Volume

Phillip Mandel, CEO of Mandel Marketing, says, "This one might sound counterintuitive, or even...