WOW Prospecting (1 of 2) by Darren Hardy

As we continue to craft a year of WOW, I thought I’d share some key ideas on how to be WOW in your prospecting efforts.Not just how to prospect, but how to prospect with WOW. There’s a difference, and quite frankly in today’s screen-filled, media-saturated, noisy and cluttered environment, you either WOW or you are just part of the ignored noise.

Let me give you some context: Twenty years ago the average consumer was hit with 2,000-3,000 marketing messages per day. Sounds like a lot, right? This happened through radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, bus benches, mailers, people spinning signs on street corners, skywriting, whatever. All in all it added up to 2,000-3,000 solicitations per day.

Today, that number is at least 10X. Today you are hit with more than 30,000 marketing messages every single day of your life. What that means to you, as a prospector, is you and your message have 10 times the competition. It costs you three times the time and money to get attention through that noise, and then ultimately it is delivering a third of the result.

Here are some fun facts for you. If scary is your thing:

The number of consumer magazines in the market has grown more than 300 percent since 1990. Websites have exploded 2.5 million percent since 1990. The number of book titles published per year is 338 percent since 1970. Television stations have expanded 6,566 percent more than existed in 1960.

Oh, get this: By the age of 66, most of us will have seen about 2 million TV commercials. It’s like watching 8 hours of advertising, 7 days a week, for 6 consecutive years. In 1965 consumers recalled almost 34 percent of those commercials; in 1990, the percentage plunged to 8 percent. According to a 2007 AC Nielsen survey, each consumer could recall an average of only 2.21 commercials among those seen in their entire life.

Now, in 2014, TV commercials… what are those, right?!

So now marketers know they can’t get you through these once reliable channels so they have to take to the streets and do hand-to-hand, one-to-one guerrilla warfare. Thus you are now being hunted down from every angle, at all times… and not just when you turn on the boob tube.

And this is proliferating. The commercial solicitation clutter keeps setting new epic records… and increasing every day.

This is why you it’s not just a good idea to learn how to WOW, you HAVE to WOW or you will just be relegated into the white noise of commercial solicitations.

Recently I called on 10 CEOs to share their best ideas on how they WOW their clients, or their story of when someone prospecting them WOWed them.

It was produced for a private audio program I do, but I am going to share that audio with you here. I think you will find it fun and super useful to you as you craft your own WOW prospecting strategy.