Fanatical Military Recruiting

8The Three Ps That Are Holding You Back

You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

—Abraham Lincoln

Prospecting is interrupting.You don’t enjoy being interrupted. Neither do your prospects. When you interrupt, the responses can be cold, harsh, and biting. Sometimes you face personal insults.

It’s awkward to interrupt someone’s day. You can’t control their response, and this unknown leaves you feeling vulnerable. Anticipating their rejection causes fear and worry. Should your prospect react harshly to being interrupted, it can hurt. It’s an uncomfortable affair that’s emotionally easier to just avoid.

Frankly, in a perfect world military recruiters wouldn’t have to interrupt prospects. It would be a loving utopia where recruiters and prospects sat in circles and sang “Kumbaya.” In this world, qualified prospects would reach out and contact recruiters at just the right time, and no one would ever have to prospect again.

But that’s a fantasy. In the War for Talent, if you wait for prospects to interrupt you, you will fail.

Prospecting has always been about the willingness on the part of the recruiter to interrupt. Relentless interrupting is fundamental to building robust recruiting pipelines. No matter your prospecting approach, if you don’t interrupt relentlessly, your funnel will be anemic, and you will miss mission.

The number-one reason for failure in military recruiting is an empty funnel, and the number-one reason recruiters have empty funnels ...