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

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...