How to Stop Being a Creepy, Annoying Sales Networker.

Give it a rest.

You don’t need to be prospecting all the time.

It’s just flat out annoying.  And creepy.

Stop it.

Conventional sales wisdom has been telling us to prospect a little each day.

Maybe it’s two hours each morning or a few minutes each afternoon — a little bit of Twitter, some LinkedIn group messaging, some Facebook photo swapping, and a little Quora question-and-answering.

You are “out there” dropping virtual business cards and using any leverage you can muster to get your message “heard”.

It sounds good. It really does.

There’s a big problem though…

It just doesn’t work.

It seems logical that we should start prospecting a little each day.  Always be dropping links to how amazing you are and why your products are so gorgeously amazing.

And besides that being misguided activity in general.  And creepy.  It’s just an efficient use of your time.

“Every day prospecting” generally leads to a lot of “half ass” activity.

It’s just not special.

What you are doing doesn’t seem to matter. And so unfortunately that’s how you begin to act.

You let other activities creep into your “allotted prospecting time”. But since it’s on your calendar you still count the activity as “finished”.

You did nothing. —>  You got nothing. —> And you keep doing it day after day like it’s working.

That’s the ongoing pattern.

It’s a downward spiral of selfishly confused agitation..

And here’s how you fix it all.

You stop the daily churn.  You chill out.

You do a burst of prospecting at a time.

You bury yourself undistracted in the task and power drive lists, connections, and potential relationships.

Here’s what will happen:

You’ll find yourself making massive momentum in a short period of time and that leads to excitement and a brighter look at your future.

It’s like a whole world of new options options opens up to you.

And frankly it has.

You made it happen with focused bursts of time and attention.

It works.

Try it next time you want to scare up more business.

You’ll also find fewer friends avoiding you.