Years ago, I wrote in ENX Magazine that net-new meetings are the life source of the business technology dealership. And guess what? They still are.
But almost everything else about our industry has changed. We’ve expanded beyond copiers into managed IT, cybersecurity, workflow, document management, unified communications, production print and an ever-growing portfolio of technology solutions. We have better CRMs, databases, marketing automation and business intelligence. We use LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and sales enablement platforms. And now, of course, there’s artificial intelligence (AI).
Yet I walk into dealerships across the country and continue to hear the same question: how do we get our salespeople to prospect consistently with better results?
That should tell us something. Maybe the biggest prospecting problem in our industry isn’t a salesperson problem—it’s an operating-model problem.
Your Sales Manager Can’t Be the Prospecting System
Think about what we ask today’s sales manager to do: recruit, onboard, forecast, inspect the CRM, run sales meetings, coach salespeople, help close deals, answer pricing questions, go on appointments, manage territories, deal with underperformance and train people on new solutions. And somehow, in between all that, they have to make sure every salesperson is prospecting.
Now we’ve added AI to that.
Good grief!
In many dealerships, the sales manager becomes the engine of the prospecting system. They remind people to make calls and send emails, check calendars, organize a phone blitz and look at CRM activity, among other tasks. If the manager stops pushing, prospecting slows down. That’s not scalable.
Your sales manager shouldn’t be your prospecting system; they should coach the system. There’s a huge difference.
Stop the Random Acts of Prospecting
Another pattern I see constantly is when a salesperson has plenty of opportunities and proposals in the pipeline, so prospecting slows down. A month or two later, several deals close, another gets pushed out and one goes to the competition. Suddenly the pipeline looks thin, and a sense of panic creeps in.
Now we’re into prospecting. Everyone gets busy. Then a few meetings appear, and we go right back to the old behavior.
I call these random acts of prospecting. Dealers don’t have an activity problem but rather a prospecting consistency problem.
Prospecting can’t be something we do because the pipeline is low. The prospecting you do today creates the revenue you’ll need months from now. That means prospecting must become an operating rhythm, not an emergency response.
AI Is Part of the Answer—Not the Answer
I love what AI is doing for prospecting. It can be one of the greatest productivity tools our industry has ever given a salesperson. But let’s get one thing straight: AI doesn’t fix a broken prospecting system.
It won’t fix your salespeople not knowing who they should target or not having prospecting time blocked on their calendars, and it won’t help if managers don’t know what numbers to coach.
If your messaging is generic, your vertical strategy is nonexistent and nobody is held accountable for creating new meetings, adding AI may simply help you become inconsistent faster. The best use of AI in prospecting is to eliminate what I call the B-time surrounding the actual selling.
Think about how much time before making a call that a salesperson can spend with research, making connections, identifying business challenges and choosing relevant solutions. Now imagine AI helping accomplish that preparation in minutes instead of an hour.
That’s what excites me. I don’t want AI replacing the salesperson. I want AI getting the salesperson ready to sell by helping them with research, preparation and intelligence. Then use your humanity to have the conversation.
One Sales Team Doesn’t Mean One Coaching Model
Why do we manage a salesperson who’s been with the dealership for 90 days the same way we manage someone who has been selling for 12 years? They don’t need the same thing, and because of this, I believe dealerships should think about salespeople in three stages of prospecting.
Stage One: Build It
Your new salesperson needs lots of structure. Start by giving them target accounts, vertical education, talk tracks and prospecting blocks. Practice objection handling. Sit with them while they make calls. Listen, coach and repeat.
At this stage, the manager needs to be highly involved because they’re developing behaviors.
Stage Two: Prove It
Now the salesperson knows what to do. The question becomes: can they produce consistent results independently? This is where the manager moves from reminding to diagnosing.
Look at where the salesperson’s conversion is breaking, whether they’re reaching decision-makers and getting meetings, and see if those meetings are becoming opportunities. The numbers will tell you what to coach.
Stage Three: Scale It
Your veteran or major account salesperson shouldn’t be managed like a rookie. But that doesn’t mean they should stop creating new businesses. They may be sitting on one of your dealership’s most valuable territories, so why allow that territory to stop producing new logos? For a veteran, prospecting may mean larger strategic accounts, competitive displacement, referrals, executive penetration, multi-threading within organizations and expanding into additional solutions. They have the same responsibility for growth but require a different level of support.
Managers Should Coach Conversion, Not Chase Activity
This may be the biggest change I would make inside a dealership. Stop making sales managers professional reminder machines; instead, give them numbers that help diagnose behavior.
The prospecting equation is simple: activity → conversations → meetings → opportunities → revenue.
Let’s say I have a salesperson who makes 75 calls, reaches 15 decision-makers, but schedules only one meeting. Should that salesperson make 100 calls? Not at all. I want to hear what happened during those 15 conversations, because we have a conversion problem. Maybe the opening is weak, they sound like every other copier salesperson who calls or they’re leading with products instead of outcomes, for example. That’s coachable.
Now imagine another salesperson who makes 75 calls but only reaches three decision-makers. That’s a different problem that may come from bad data, wrong titles, poor timing or wrong accounts.
Managers should coach by exception; find the point where the numbers break, and coach there. That reduces management workload while dramatically improving the quality of coaching.
Define the Number That Feeds Everything
Dealerships love to measure everything from dials and emails to pipeline and revenue. But before we create another dashboard, let’s make sure everybody agrees on the number that feeds all of them: net-new qualified meetings.
I would even go one step further—ask 10 people in your dealership what counts as a qualified net-new meeting. Would you get 10 identical answers? If not, start by defining a net-new meeting, then determine how many qualified meetings each salesperson needs to create enough opportunities to achieve their revenue goal.
From there, reverse-engineer the math. Revenue requires sales, which require proposals, which come from opportunities, which begin with meetings, which require conversations, which need prospecting activity.
Now you’re not giving salespeople arbitrary activity goals. You’re showing them the mathematics of their own success, including how much money they make every prospecting touch and what it takes to reach their monetary goals.
Calendar Before Willpower
I stand by the fact that you calendarize for the income you want, and salespeople still tell me it’s hard to find time to prospect. But nobody “finds” prospecting time; successful salespeople manufacture it. Put it on the calendar, protect it and prepare for it.
Here’s where modern technology becomes so important: prospecting time shouldn’t become research time. If I have a 90-minute prospecting block, I don’t want to spend 45 minutes figuring out whom to call.
You should have already identified accounts, researched executives, prepared your messaging and looked at vertical information. AI can help with the preparation so the salesperson can spend selling time actually selling.
Building a System That Works Without Constant Reminders
Here’s a simple test every dealer principal should consider: if your sales manager stopped reminding salespeople to prospect for a month, what would happen? For example, would prospecting continue? Would managers still have visibility? Would qualified net-new meetings continue entering the pipeline? If the answers are no, you don’t have a prospecting system yet. You have manager effort, and manager effort has a ceiling.
A modern prospecting operating system needs clear expectations, calendarization, defined target accounts, vertical messaging, technology-supported preparation, measurable conversion points and consistent coaching. Technology can support that system, AI can accelerate it and your CRM can measure it, but leadership has to build it.
I believe the modern sales manager has three responsibilities when it comes to prospecting:
- Set the standard.
- Inspect the system.
- Coach the gap.
That’s it. No helping with prospecting, writing every email or constantly chasing CRM entries.
Our industry has spent years modernizing what we sell. Now it’s time to modernize how we create the conversations that allow us to sell it. The dealerships that win the next generation of net-new business won’t necessarily have the most tools, but they’ll combine old-school selling discipline with new-school technology.
They’ll know how to use AI without losing humanity; measure outcomes instead of celebrating busyness; and give new salespeople structure, develop salespeople’s coaching and set strategic expectations for veteran salespeople. Most importantly, they’ll stop relying on heroic sales managers to hold the entire prospecting process together.
Build the system, coach the system and improve the system. Because after all the technology, dashboards, automation and AI, one fundamental truth about our business hasn’t changed: if you make more meetings, you make more money.
