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

Superstars are relentless, unstoppable prospectors. They are obsessive about keeping their pipeline full of qualified prospects. They prospect anywhere and anytime—constantly turning over rocks looking for their next opportunity. They prospect day and night—unstoppable and always on. Fanatical!

The brutal fact is the number one reason for failure in sales is an empty pipe, and, the root cause of an empty pipeline is the failure to prospect.

The next step is keeping it real. In sales, business, and life, there are only three things you can control: Your Actions Your Reactions Your Mindset That's it. Nothing more. So instead of whining about the things that are out of your control, focus your energy on what you can control—your attitude, choices, emotions, goals, ambitions, dreams, desires, and discipline (choosing between what you want now and what you want most). Stop Wishing That Things Were Easier and Start

you shouldn't wish that things were easier; you should wish that you were better. That's

Optimistic and enthusiastic: Fanatical prospectors have a winning, optimistic mindset. They know that negative, bitter people with a victim mindset do not succeed in sales.

Competitive: Fanatical prospectors view prospecting through the eyes of a fierce competitor.

Confident: Fanatical prospectors approach prospecting with confidence. They expect to win and believe they are going to win.

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.

Interrupting your prospect's day is a fundamental building block of robust sales pipelines. No matter your prospecting approach, if you don't interrupt relentlessly, your pipeline will be anemic.

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.

downtown Chicago, you may be more efficient and effective prospecting

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.

Top sales professionals spend as much as 80

They want to get up to the plate often and put together a consistent string of singles, doubles, triples, and a few home runs.

There are three core laws of prospecting tha...

The Universal Law of Need The 30-Day Rule The Law of Replacement

desperation. It states that the more you need something, the less likely it is that you will get it. This

Desperation magnifies and accelerates failure and virtually guarantees that he won't close the deals he must have to survive.

In shorter-cycle transactional sales, the 30-Day Rule may become the “One-Week Rule,” but the concept remains the same.

The 30-Day Rule states that the prospecting you do in this 30-day period will pay off for the next 90 days. It is a simple, yet powerful universal rule that governs sales and you ignore it at your peril. When you internalize this rule, it will drive you to never put prospecting aside for another day.

Here's a math question: Becky has 30 prospects in her pipeline. Her closing percentage is 10 percent. She closes one deal. How many prospects remain in her pipe? Most people answer 29. The real answer is 20. So why 20? Here's the math. Becky has a 1 in 10 probability of closing a deal. That means on average she will close only one deal out of 10 prospects she puts in her pipeline. The net result is when she closes one deal, the other nine are no longer viable prospects. This means her pipeline will be reduced by 10 prospects rather than one. She must now replace those 10 prospects to keep her pipeline full.

The lesson the Law of Replacement teaches is that you must constantly be pushing new opportunities into your pipeline so that you're replacing the opportunities that will naturally fall out. And, you must do so at a rate that matches or exceeds your closing ratio. This is where a fanatical prospecting mindset really begins to pay off.