Sales prospecting: how to find and qualify new customers, and keep your team doing it every week

Sales prospecting is finding people who might buy, checking they fit, and starting a conversation. Most teams know how. It stops when the week gets busy, so your job as manager is to keep it going.

• Start with people who already know you: past customers and introductions. Then add calls, email, LinkedIn and events.
• Qualify before you spend a meeting: right person, right company, right time.
• Work the target back to a weekly number of calls for each rep.
• Have each rep count calls, conversations, meetings and deals, then swap your guessed ratios for theirs after four weeks.
• Check your Do Not Call position before anyone rings a Singapore number with a marketing call.

Every number in the worked example is made up. The Do Not Call rule was read from PDPC on 2 November 2026.

As of November 2026.

A prospect is a person or company who could buy from you and fits who you sell to. Prospecting is the work of finding them and getting a first conversation. A name on a list only becomes a prospect once someone has checked the fit.

It matters because deals closed this month usually started with calls made weeks earlier. A team that stops prospecting in a good month feels it a month or two later, when it's too late to fix quickly.

Put these in this order on your team. The top of the table is usually the quickest to pay off, and most reps start at the bottom because it doesn't feel like selling.

Give your reps the words. Each of these needs changing until it sounds like them.

• To a past customer: "Hi [name], it's been a while since [the project]. How's [the thing we did] going now?"
• To ask for an introduction: "Thanks again for [the project]. Who do you know who runs a team of five or six and still does the reporting on a spreadsheet?"
• To someone new: "Hi [name], I work with [who you help] on [the one problem]. I noticed [one true thing about them]. Would a 20-minute call be useful?"

Your reps' time goes further when they ask three things before booking a meeting.

A no on any of these isn't a dead name. It's a question for the next call, or a date to try again in a few months.

Prospecting falls apart when the target is a year away and nobody knows what the week needs. Here's one made-up rep, followed all the way down.

Say the target is 46 new deals this year. Take out about six weeks for leave and public holidays and that's 46 selling weeks, or 1 deal a week. You don't know the rep's ratios yet, so start with a guess:

48 calls over five days is 9.6, so call it 10 a day. The quota calculator helps with the target itself.

The calls that get skipped are the ones left until everything else is done. Ask each rep to put their calls in one block at the same time every day, with the list ready before it starts. Ten calls with a minute or two of notes after each fit in about an hour.

If a day goes wrong, don't let them carry 10 extra calls into the next one. Twenty calls in one block rarely happens, and the missed day is easier to see when it stays missed. The daily sales routine lays this out.

Count calls, conversations, meetings booked and deals. If you only count deals, a bad month shows up when it's too late to change it. Calls with no answer count too, because your ratios are built from them.

Logging has to be quick, or it won't happen: a form after every call is how a tracker gets abandoned. The sales tracker template has the columns if you're starting on a sheet.

After four weeks each rep has their own counts to replace the guess. In the example they came to:

Now redo the sum. 1 deal needs 4 meetings. 4 meetings at 3 in 10 need 13.3 conversations, so 14. 14 conversations at 1 in 5 need 70 calls. That's 14 calls a day where the guess said 10, or 80 more over four weeks of five days.

Across a made-up team of 8 reps on the same ratios, that's 560 calls a week. Your reps' ratios will differ, which is why each one works from their own.

Fifteen minutes each, from their numbers, with the question on the weakest step. "Your calls were on pace, but conversations dropped. What changed?" gets further than "you need to make more calls".

When a rep misses two weeks running, talk about it that week. A slump usually starts with skipped calls that nobody noticed. The one-on-one template has the agenda.

The week's calls should be visible without anyone asking. If you show a leaderboard, count calls and meetings as well as deals, and start it fresh each week. Otherwise the same two names sit on top, and the middle of the team stops looking.

Here's the plain rule, from PDPC. It covers voice calls, SMS and apps such as WhatsApp that use a Singapore number.

• Before a marketing message to a Singapore number, check the number against the Do Not Call Registry. PDPC says: "Results are valid for 21 days from the date the check was conducted."
• You don't need the check if the person gave clear and unambiguous consent that you can show later.
• A call to a company about the company's own needs is outside the rule. PDPC's example is a seller phoning an HR manager on her business number about a product for her company. Once he asks if she'd like something for herself, the rule applies again.

PDPC also says a business that authorises someone to promote it can be treated as authorising their messages, so this is your problem as well as your reps'. PDPC's page, read on 2 November 2026, puts the one-time set-up fee for a Singapore-registered organisation at S$32.70 including GST, with 1,000 free credits a year and a charge per number checked after that.

Rename the starting tiles to Calls, Conversations, Meetings and Deals, then set their points. Each one is a tap on the rep's phone, or /log in a private Telegram chat, and the board moves within seconds, with each tile's count on Singapore weeks. Needs you today lists anyone with no entry for 3 days, then whoever is furthest behind their weekly goal. It counts the activity and leaves the names and deals to whatever you already use, with no CRM to feed it. See how activity tracking works.

• PDPC, How to check numbers against the Do Not Call Registry, pdpc.gov.sg, read 2 November 2026
• PDPC, Advisory Guidelines on the Do Not Call Provisions, revised 1 February 2021, pdpc.gov.sg, read 2 November 2026