When it comes to building and sustaining your business, storytelling is a crucial aspect of successful prospecting. But in these narratives, you are not the hero — here to save the day for clients desperately in need of your superpowers. Rather, you want to position your potential new clients in the center of their stories, while you fulfill the role of an empathetic, authoritative, understanding guide capable of helping them achieve a happy ending. First, let’s define prospecting, a term that’s thrown around often to describe various networking activities. I used to think about it literally, imagining the old prospectors from the gold rush. But prospecting, simply put, is the act of finding and winning new business. Think of it this way: If you’re good at prospecting, you’re continuously filling your pipeline with new opportunities, increasing the sustainability of your business, and, to some extent, preparing to pick up market share when competition fades. If you’re not prospecting, the inverse is true. The next recession should scare you to death. You should wake up every morning with the realization that you are leaving money on the table.

Pitching Yourself: Your client has been cast as the hero and you’re the wise person to guide them to success, but let’s back up a moment. How can you pitch this movie to a potential client? After all, it’s no use to reframe this relationship unless you can engage with prospects. The value proposition is essential in building relationships and cultivating leads. Click to read more at www.ccim.com.