Two of these you’ve probably already guessed. The other three might be the reason your pipeline isn’t moving the way it should.
Ray Higdon breaks down five prospecting mistakes that are actively costing people sales, and at least one of them is almost certainly in your current approach.
Mistake 1: You’re Not Asking Enough People
This one sits at the top for a reason.
Ray has a single diagnostic question he uses to gauge whether someone is serious about building their business: how many people last week did you ask if they were open to your product, service, or opportunity?
If the answer is a single-digit number, or zero, you’re making exactly what you should be making. The math is unforgiving here. You can’t close what you never opened.
Most people dramatically underestimate how few conversations they’re actually starting. They confuse being busy with being productive. Creating content, organizing notes, watching training videos, none of that is the same as making offers to real people.
Posture Check: Your output is a direct reflection of your activity. If sales are slow, the first place to look is not your pitch, your product, or the market. It’s the number of conversations you started last week.
Mistake 2: You’re Not Following Up
Most people give up far too early.
Ray draws a distinction between two words here: relentless and persistent. Relentless can feel mechanical, like you’re just hammering away without thought. Persistent is educated. Persistent is intelligent. It means you keep showing up in a way that serves the relationship, not just the transaction.
He shares a story from 2011. A local contact told him no seven times. Seven. The person had been involved in something with Ray before that hadn’t worked out well, so the resistance was real and personal.
Ray kept following up anyway. Eventually the person said yes, built a six-figure income, quit his job, and has been a full-time marketer ever since.
That’s one story. There are thousands like it that never get told because someone stopped following up after the second no.
Posture Check: A no today is not a no forever. Be persistent. Keep showing up. The fortune is in the follow-up, and most people abandon it exactly one conversation too soon.
Mistake 3: You’re Judging Who to Prospect
You’re making decisions for people who haven’t made them yet.
It sounds like this: “Should I reach out to Chris? He’s super busy right now, probably not a good time. She’s finishing college, I’ll wait until after graduation.”
Stop it.
You don’t know what Chris is dealing with. You don’t know what she’s hoping for. You’re not a mind reader, and you’re not doing anyone any favors by pre-disqualifying them before they’ve had a chance to say yes or no for themselves.
Your job is not to close everyone. Your job is to see who’s open. That’s a completely different energy. One creates pressure. The other creates invitation.
Ask the question. Let them decide. The ones who say no quickly are actually doing you a favor by freeing up your time for the ones who are open.
Posture Check: Stop filtering your prospect list based on what you imagine their life to be like. You don’t have that information. Ask and let them tell you.
Mistake 4: You’re Making the Prospect the Prize
When you’re chasing, begging, and following up with commission breath, you’ve already flipped the dynamic in the wrong direction.
Here’s the reality Ray keeps coming back to: there are more people in the world with problems and no solutions than there are people with actual solutions to offer. You are on the solution side of that equation.
That doesn’t mean talking down to people or treating them as less than. It means carrying yourself with the quiet confidence of someone who has something genuinely useful. Because you do.
You and what you represent are the prize. Not the prospect. The prospect has a problem. You have something that might solve it. Those two things should give you a very different energy than desperation.
Posture Check: You cannot fake this mindset, but you can build it. When you genuinely believe in your product, service, or opportunity and understand that solutions are scarce, the neediness starts to fall away on its own.
Mistake 5: You’re Focused on Your Solution Instead of Their Problem
This is the one Ray calls the most important distinction in whether someone is making sales or not.
Most reps lead with features, benefits, and product details. They talk about the ingredients, the compensation plan, the timing, the exclusivity. All of that is solution-focused. And solution-focused pitches come across as pushy almost every time, because you haven’t yet earned the right to present a solution. You haven’t found out what they actually need.
The shift is simple but profound: dig into their problem before you ever mention your solution.
Ray tells the story of a prospect who said he wanted to make more money. Ray didn’t stop there. He asked why. The prospect deflected with something vague. Ray kept asking. A few questions in, the real answer came out: his recently widowed mother was living with him and his new wife, the situation was deteriorating, and she needed to move into a nursing home. He needed money with real urgency, not as a nice-to-have.
One question later, “Is that something optional or something you really need to do?”, and the prospect’s energy shifted completely. He went from “it’d be nice” to “I need to do something about this.”
That’s expanding the problem. And when the problem is fully expanded, the prospect takes almost any reasonable solution.
Ray draws a clear line between persuasion and manipulation: manipulation is getting someone to do what you want. Persuasion is helping someone do what they already want to do, but haven’t fully committed to yet.
The questions that expand the problem aren’t tricks. They’re the mechanism by which a prospect convinces themselves.
Posture Check: What made you watch the presentation? Why did you show up today? What are you hoping this solves? Those questions are worth more than any product feature you could ever list.
The Common Thread
Every one of these mistakes points back to the same root issue: a focus on yourself and your needs rather than on the prospect and theirs.
Not enough activity means you’re avoiding the discomfort of asking. Not following up means you’re protecting yourself from another no. Pre-judging prospects means you’re filtering based on your own assumptions. Making the prospect the prize means you need them more than you believe in what you offer. Leading with your solution means you haven’t taken the time to understand what they actually need.
Fix any one of these and your results improve. Fix all five and your prospecting becomes a completely different experience.
Excerpt: Ray Higdon breaks down 5 prospecting mistakes costing you sales right now, including the one psychology shift that changes everything about how you close.
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