Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling (Jeb Blount)

by Jeb Blount

“Prospecting is the core, the foundation, the heart of every successful sales effort.

Law of the Universe: Nothing happens until something moves. Law of Business: Nothing happens until someone sells something.

When a company's sales organization is failing to make its number or reach its potential, it is not because its salespeople can't present well, are ineffective closers, or lack the skills for offering insight or challenging prospects. It's rarely because of a deficit of talent. The reason most sales organizations are not making their numbers is that the pipeline is anemic because the sales team is not prospecting.

They don't make excuses: “Oh, this is not a good time to call because they might be at lunch.” They don't complain: “Nobody is calling me back.” They don't whine: “The leads are bad.” They don't live in fear: “What if she says no?” Or “What if this is a bad time?” They don't procrastinate: “I don't have time right now. I'll catch up tomorrow.” They prospect when times are good because they know that a rainy day is right around the corner. They prospect when times are bad because they know that fanatical prospecting is the key to survival. They prospect even when they don't feel like prospecting because they are driven to keep their pipeline full.

They get up in the morning and bang the phone. During the day they knock on doors. In between meetings they prospect with e-mail and text. At night they connect with and engage prospects on social media. Before they quit for the day they make even more calls. The enduring mantra of the fanatical prospector is: One more call.

We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don't like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.

Success leaves clues. Highly successful people, from ancient philosophers like Aristotle to modern-day thought leaders, have always made the point that there is little need to “reinvent the wheel.” If you study what successful people do, you find patterns. When you duplicate those patterns, you'll be able to duplicate their success.

If you want sustained success in your sales career, if you want to maximize your income, then you've got to interrupt prospects. You'll have to pick up the phone, walk in the door, send an e-mail or text message, or ping a prospect on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, or Facebook and interrupt someone who is not expecting you to contact them (i.e., you don't have an appointment or they are not waiting for you to call or write) and with whom you are not currently engaged in a sales discussion.

You can argue the degrees, warm, hot, cold, whatever. It could be a prospect that filled out one of your web forms or downloaded your latest white paper. Maybe they just connected with you online. It could be an old customer you are trying to reactivate, or a prospect in your defined database, or a new business that you've stopped by to qualify, or a prospect you met at a trade show. No matter the circumstance, the simple fact remains that you are interrupting their day to talk about something you want them to hear, do, or buy, and you do not have a scheduled appointment with them to have that conversation. This is what gets missed in all of the useless noise about how cold calling is dead. All of the talking heads who promise an easy way out if you'll just join their little cult ignore the real reason that prospecting is so hard, no matter how you choose to do it. It has never been about degree of the call; it is has always been about the willingness on the part of the salesperson to interrupt. Which, by the way, is why most sales reps protest so loudly and will do anything to avoid making an outbound call. It is so much easier to speak to someone who is calling you. The problem is, most companies can't create enough qualified inbound leads to keep the pipeline full. And, by the way, the reps that work for companies that do generate enough inbound leads to keep the phones ringing are making far less than sales pros who are reaching out and interrupting prospects to create...

In sales, consistently relying on a single prospecting methodology (usually the one you feel generates the least amount of resistance and rejection), at the expense of others, consistently generates mediocre results. However, balancing your prospecting regimen based on your industry, product, company, territory, and tenure in your territory gives you a statistical advantage that almost always leads to higher performance and income over the long term.

The very best salespeople have mastered balanced prospecting in the same manner that wealthy people have mastered balance in their investment portfolios. Balance simply means that to get the best return from your prospecting time investment, there should be a mixture of telephone, in-person, e-mail, social selling, text messaging, referrals, networking, inbound leads, trade shows, and cold calling. The relative distribution of your time investment in each prospecting methodology should be based on your unique situation.

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

The unrelenting daily imperative for every salesperson is keeping the pipeline full of qualified prospects. Top sales professionals spend as much as 80 percent of their time on prospecting and qualifying activities for one important reason: They want to get up to the plate often and put together a consistent string of singles, doubles, triples, and a few home runs.

The Universal Law of Need It is when pipelines are empty that salespeople find themselves face to face with the Universal Law of Need. The Universal Law of Need governs desperation. It states that the more you need something, the less likely it is that you will get it. This law comes into play in sales when lack of activity has left your pipeline depleted. When all of your hope for survival rests on one, two, or even a handful of accounts, the probability of failure increases exponentially. Consider Jerry. His prospecting is inconsistent at best. Several of the deals he was counting on and put into his forecast pushed off decisions to next quarter or were lost to a competitor. Because of this, he has only a handful of viable opportunities left in his pipeline. Now, with the end of the quarter looming, Jerry is under tremendous pressure. He desperately needs one of these deals to close. As Jerry becomes more desperate to close anything, he comes face to face with a cruel reality: Desperation magnifies and accelerates failure and virtually guarantees that he won't close the deals he must have to survive. There are several reasons why desperation increases the probability that Jerry will fail when he needs to succeed the most. The first is that desperation taps into the downside of the Law of Attraction, which states that what you focus your thoughts on, you are most likely to get. When you are desperate, you no longer focus your thoughts on what is required for success. Inst...

The 30-Day Rule “Hey, Jeb, got a minute?” The voice on the line was familiar. “Sure, Greg, what's up?” Greg is a sales pro who lives in my town. We've known each other for years. “I was wondering if you might have a minute to talk.” I was stuck in traffic on the parking lot called I-285 in Atlanta and had nowhere to go, so Greg started telling me his story. He explained that for some reason nothing he was working on was closing. He was getting frustrated, feeling that he'd lost his edge, and looking for tips that would help him get some deals closed. It was early March and he was worried that he was going to end up having a bad quarter. Slumps can quickly erode confidence and create a feeling of desperation. “Greg,” I asked, “just by chance are you calling the same prospects over and over? And are these prospects the same ones you were trying to close in February?” “Yes. They keep putting me off. I was wondering if you might have some closing techniques or something I can say to get them to pull the trigger.” “Greg, this is going to sound like a weird question, so bear with me. How much were you working in December?” “Well, we had a lot going on in December and I didn't get in as much time as I had hoped. We also took a couple of weeks off at the end of the year. You know how it is around the holidays.” “So you weren't doing as much prospecting as usual?” There was silence on the other end of the line. “Oh, crap, Jeb—the 30-Day Rule! I didn't even see it.” Greg didn't have...

Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers. —Shakuntala Devi

Sales is and always has been governed by numbers because, in sales, the formula for success is a simple mathematical formula: What (quality) you put into the pipe and how much (quantity) determines what you get out of the pipe. Numbers, or the “how much,” are the science of sales. The “what”—the size of the prospects, the quality of the prospects, the qualification level of the prospects, the depth of your penetration and relationships with decisions makers, influencers, and coaches—that is a little bit of science and art.

Elite salespeople, like elite athletes, track everything. You will never reach peak performance until you know your numbers and use those numbers to make directional corrections.

At any given moment, you should know how many calls, contacts, e-mails, responses, appointments, and sales you have made. You should track social prospecting activity on sites like LinkedIn, text messages sent, and even smoke signals (if that is relevant). You should measure how many new prospects or new information points you've gathered about existing prospects that you've added to your database.

Once you are tracking your numbers consistently, the door is opened to an honest assessment of both the efficiency and the eff...

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible. —Francis of Assisi

To succeed in sales, simply talk to lots of people every day. And here's what's exciting—there are lots of people! —Jim Rohn

Horstman's Corollary Parkinson's Law states that work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it. Horstman's Corollary is the converse. It describes how work contracts to fit into the time allowed. I simply changed the paradigm the reps were working under—instead of giving them an entire day to make their prospecting calls, I gave them 30 minutes. I repeat this exercise with salespeople within organizations across the globe, and the results are always the same. Salespeople and leaders are absolutely stunned at how much they get done when they block their time, focus on a single activity, and set an outcome goal for that activity. Time blocking is transformational for salespeople. It changes everything. When you get disciplined at blocking your time and concentrating your power, you see a massive and profound impact on your productivity. You become incredibly efficient when you block your day into short chunks of time for specific activities. You get more accomplished in a shorter time with far better results. For example, the average Sales Gravy inside sales rep makes around 120 outbound prospecting calls a day selling employment advertising to companies that are hiring salespeople. To most people, that seems like a huge number of calls, and it is. But what really causes a double take is when they learn that we do this in just three hours. Which leaves plenty of time for updating the CRM, building presentations, making follow-up calls, creating proposals, closing dea...

Concentrate Your Power What makes prospecting blocks so productive is the concentration of all of your power on a single focus. Of course this flies right in the face of a culture that has elevated the multitasker to mythical status. Perhaps you're the kind of person who believes you can multitask. You can field text messages from your mom, scan your Facebook feed, take calls from existing customers, answer e-mails, and dig through your CRM to research each prospect, all while you are making prospecting calls. You pride yourself on being a multitasker and even brag about your ability to do so many things at the same time. Here's the truth: You suck at it! Basic neuroscience refutes the delusional human belief that we are good at multitasking. Our brains don't actually multitask. Instead, when we are working on more than one thing at a time, our brain cycles back and forth between those things. It does this so fast that we have the illusion of multitasking. Which is why we suck at it. Your brain was not made to multitask. Sure, it was designed to operate in complex environments and process multiple streams of data at once. You can cook dinner and watch TV at the same time, drive and talk. But your brain was not made to talk, walk, rub your belly, and chew gum. You simply cannot do multiple tasks all at one time and do them well. When you have too many things going on at once (especially complex tasks), your brain begins to bog down and you start slowing down. It is no diffe...

The objective is the primary outcome you expect from your prospecting touch. There are four core prospective objectives: Set an appointment. Gather information and qualify. Close a sale. Build familiarity.

Each day salespeople waste time, energy, and emotion swinging at ugly deals. Deals that are unprofitable, unqualified, not in the buying window, don't have a budget, don't have an identified decision maker, or because of contracts don't have the ability to buy. From the outside looking in, it is obvious that these low-probability, ugly deals will never close and will divert the salesperson's time and attention from better opportunities. Yet, in spite of the obvious signs, salespeople forge forward, either delusional or oblivious, placing these deals in their pipelines and projections, wasting endless hours working on ugly deals that will never close. Sadly, the results are predictable. Almost all of these salespeople strike out.

Savvy sales professionals are super disciplined in qualifying prospects. They understand that time is money and it is a waste of time to work with prospects that are not going to buy. They know that qualified buyers are scarce, and a moment spent with a prospect who will never buy takes them away from their most important task—finding prospects that will buy.

Because these prospects are in the buying window it will be much easier to convert them into an appointment, demo, or sale. Starting your day by calling the prospects on the top of your pyramid will deliver early wins. These wins give you confidence and motivation to attack the remainder of the sales day.

A Trash Can or a Gold Mine More often than not, salespeople treat their database like a trash can rather than a gold mine. Call notes aren't inputted. Records aren't kept up to date. Calls are not logged. This inattention to detail causes the value and integrity of the database to be undermined, leaving salespeople struggling to set appointments and engage the right prospects, at the right time, with the right message because they don't know who to call.

“Patricia, thank you again for your business. I'm glad to hear you are happy with us. I'm working hard to add more customers like you. Would you be able to introduce me to other people in your network who might want to use our product?”

also send a short text to thank the person for taking time to speak with me, followed by a LinkedIn connection request to further anchor familiarity. Finally, I log any leads in my CRM no later than the next morning. If I promised to send something, schedule an appointment, or introduce them to someone else, I schedule a task and take action within 24 hours of the event. Then I follow up on a regular basis until I move my networking prospects into the pipeline.

Sales is a blend of art and science. The art is influencing people to make commitments. The science is influencing the right people. —Jeb Blount

what is happening on the inside of you manifests itself in your outward confidence and enthusiasm.

“I'd like 15 minutes of your time because I want to learn more about you and your company”

“Hi, Candace, this is Jeb Blount from Sales Gravy. The reason I am calling is to schedule an appointment with you to show you our new sales onboarding automation software. Many of my clients are frustrated because it takes too long to get new salespeople ramped up to full productivity and find that it's holding their business growth back. Our software typically cuts onboarding time and costs for new sales reps by 50 percent, and makes it super easy to manage new rep onboarding, giving you the peace of mind that your new hires will start selling fast. I have 2:00 PM on Thursday open. How about we get together for a short meeting so I can learn more about you and see whether it makes sense to schedule a demo?”

“Hi, Windsor, this is Jeb Blount from Sales Gravy. The reason I am calling is to set an appointment with you. I read in Fast Company that you are adding another hundred sales reps to keep up with growth. I imagine that it has got to be a bit stressful to bring on that many reps and get them producing. “I've worked with a number of companies in your industry to reduce ramp-up time for new reps. At Xjam Software, for example, we cut ramp-up time to ROI for their new reps by 50 percent. While I don't know if our solution would be a fit in your unique situation, I've got some ideas and best practices I've seen work well for companies like yours and thought you might be interested in learning more about them. How about we get together for a short meeting on Thursday at 2:00 PM?”

The most effective way to craft the right message is to simply stand in your prospect's shoes. Look at things through their eyes and use your God-given empathy to sense their emotions and to consider what might be important to them. Consider how you might feel in their situation. Start by answering these questions from your prospect's perspective: What would cause you stress? When do you feel stress? What makes you worry? When do you worry? Why do you worry? What creates anxiety? When do you feel anxiety? How do you feel when you run out of time for important things? How do you feel when you don't have enough money to accomplish your goals? When does this happen? How do you feel when you don't have enough resources to accomplish your goals? When does this happen? How do you feel when you don't have the knowledge to accomplish your goals? When does this happen? How do you feel when you fail to accomplish your goals? When do you get overwhelmed, and how does it feel? What impacts your peace of mind or sense of security? How would it feel to have limited options? What is causing you to feel frustrated or stuck? What makes you mad? What causes you to feel distrust? What causes you fear? What causes you anguish? How do you feel when ______ happens? What might you want to know? What unknown would make you worry? What information would you fear getting into your competitor's hands? What might a competitor be doing that would make you want to do it, too? What information would you...

Here is the brutal truth: There is only one technique that really works for getting what you want on a prospecting touch. Ask. That's it. Just ask. Ask for the appointment, ask for information, ask for the decision maker, ask for the next step, ask for the sale. Ask for what you want. Ask. The fact is, if you are having a hard time getting appointments, getting to decision makers, getting information, or closing the deal, 9 out of 10 times it is because you are not asking. Why? Because 9 out of 10 times you are afraid to hear “no.”

Starting with prospecting and all the way through the close, you must constantly be asking for what you want. Otherwise your deals tend to stall and die or you never get into the door in the first place. There are three steps to asking: Ask with confidence and assume you will get what you want. Shut up. Be prepared to deal with reflex responses, brush-offs, and objections.

Get their attention by using their name: “Hi, Julie.” Identify yourself: “My name is Jeb Blount and I'm with Sales Gravy.” Tell them why you are calling: “The reason I'm calling is to set up an appointment with you.” Bridge—give them a because: “I just read an article online that said your company is going to add 200 new sales positions over the next year. Several companies in your industry are already using Sales Gravy exclusively for sourcing sales candidates and they are very happy with the results we are delivering.” Ask for what you want, and shut up: “I thought the best place to start is to schedule a short meeting to learn about your sales recruiting challenges and goals. How about we meet Wednesday afternoon around 3:00 PM?”

“Hi, Ian, this is Jeb Blount with Acme Restaurant Supply. The reason I'm calling is I read in the paper that you are building a restaurant over on the 44 bypass and I want to learn more about your process for purchasing kitchen equipment. I realize I'm calling a little bit early in the game; however, I've found that when we get our design team working with your team before you make critical decisions about kitchen layout, you'll have more options and can often save a ton of money in construction costs and future labor with a more efficient and streamlined kitchen layout. Can you tell me how you make those decisions and when the selection process will begin?”

“Hi, Corrina, this is Jeb Blount from AcmeSoft. The reason I'm calling is you downloaded our white paper on creating more effective landing pages for lead generation and I'm interested to learn what triggered your interest. I work with a number of marketing executives who've been struggling to bring in enough quality leads to meet their growth objectives, and I've got a few best practices that my clients are using to generate more and better leads that I'll be happy to share with you. Can you tell me more about your situation?”

“Hi, Rick, this is Jeb Blount from Sales Gravy. My phone number is 1-888-360-2249, that's 1-888-360-2249. The reason I am calling is you downloaded our white paper on cold calling and I want to learn more about your situation and what triggered you to seek out this information. I also have some additional resources on voice mail messages and phone prospecting I thought you might be curious to learn about. Let's get together this week. Give me a call back at 1-888-360-2249, that's 1-888-360-2249.”

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. —Mike Tyson