Playing favorites is natural, but bad for your pipeline
There is a common tendency in sales to favor those prospects who are further along in the pipeline to new ones. It's natural, and there are good psychological reasons for this.

First of all, the further along prospects are in your pipeline, the more likely they are to be visible in your diary and to do list. You may have a meeting scheduled or a follow-up call set up. On the other hand, brand new prospects are somewhat more nebulous. Dealing with them doesn't seem to be urgent and hey may not have a slot in your calendar at all.

Another reason we tend to favor conversations that are further along is that these are the more comfortable ones. An initial sales call can be intimidating simply because the possibility of rejection is so much higher. But you must always keep in mind that your "solid as gold" prospects required hard work initially.

1. Don't get side tracked: schedule time for prospecting
   You will always have to respond to emails, take phone calls or revise and send out proposals. These activities are necessary, but so is having enough time for prospecting. The truth of the matter is that it's the activity of adding new prospects into the pipeline that creates the need for all these other activities in the first place.
2. Block the necessary time that you require to make these calls every week or every day in your calendar.
   If a client wishes to talk during these time slots, schedule the conversation for another time. The time you block for adding new prospects should be set in stone and unbreakable.
   
   This is the only way to avoid the trap of allowing the myriad of other daily activities to consume critical prospecting time.
3. Get in The Zone
   It's easy to get into the habit of squeezing sales calls in between other activities. The downside is that this breaks up your rhythm.
   
   You'll find that you have much better results if you make all your calls at once. You get into the zone by making 10 calls in a row, not by making them randomly throughout the day.

Keep up the good work, it's just a matter of time
This is a simple and straight-forward lesson. When you schedule the right amount of time to keeping new prospects flowing into your pipeline, you will see that your pipe is always full and a steady stream of deals is flowing from the other end.

PS. If you would like some help in determining the number of new conversations you need to add to your pipeline, refer to our handy Sales Pipeline Calculator.