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

built

20 percent that produce 80 percent of sales.

They understand how to manage the sales process, ask great questions, deliver winning presentations, and close the deal.

They have

excep...

Fanatical prospecting. 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! My favorite definition of the word fanatical is “motivated or characterized by an extreme, uncritical enthusiasm.”1

Superstars view prospecting as a way of life. They prospect with single-minded focus, worrying little about what other people think of them. They enthusiastically dive into telephone prospecting, e-mail prospecting, cold calling, networking, asking for referrals, knocking on doors, following up on leads, attending trade shows, and striking up conversations with strangers. 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...

One more call.

They generate their own leads and through hard work, determination, and perseverance, their own luck.

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.

quixotic

all time.” So companies promise, again and again, that you can lose weight, flip houses, or get rich with no pain, no sacrifice, and no effort. Their phones ring off the hook, even though intuitively, most people know these promises are overhyped and not true. It is just human nature to seek the easy way out.

There will always be rejection.

The first step toward building an endless pipeline of new customers is acknowledging the truth and stepping back from your emotional need to find Easy Street.

keeping it real.

Your Actions Your Reactions Your Mindset

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).

Developing a fanatical prospecting mindset starts with coming to grips with the fact that prospecting is hard, grueling, rejection-dense work.

Jim Rohn once said that you shouldn't wish that things were easier; you should wish that you were better.

and do it anyway.

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. Fanatical prospectors attack each day with enthusiasm—fired

up and ready to rock. They view each day as a fresh new opportunity to achieve. Because of this, they seize the day, brush past naysayers and complainers, and dive into prospecting with unequaled drive. Even on bad days they reach deep inside and find enough stored enthusiasm to push themselves to keep going and make one more call. Competitive: Fanatical prospectors view prospecting through the eyes of a fierce competitor. They are hardwired to win and will do whatever it takes to stay on top. They begin each day prepared to win the battle for the attention of the most coveted prospects, and outwit and outhustle their competitors at every turn. Confident: Fanatical prospectors approach prospecting with confidence. They expect to win and believe they are going to win. They have developed mental toughness and the ability to manage the disruptive emotions of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They leverage confidence and self-control to persuade prospects to give up time and resources to engage in sales conversations.

Relentless: Fanatical prospectors have a high need for achievement. They do whatever it takes to reach their goal. They never, ever give up believing that persistence always wins. They use rejection as motivational fuel to get up and keep going with a determined belief that their next “yes” is right around the corner. Thirsty for knowledge: Fanatical prospectors welcome feedback and coaching. They seek out every opportunity to learn and invest in themselves by voraciously consuming books, podcasts, audiobooks, blog posts, online training, live seminars, and anything else they believe will make them better. They have an unshakable belief that everything happens for a reason and through this lens view setbacks as opportunities to learn and grow. Systematic and efficient: Fanatical p...

their power to tune out distractions and avoid disruptions. They systematically develop their prospect database to build more effective and targeted lists, and squeeze every moment from each sales day. Adaptive and flexible: Fanatical prospectors have acute situational awareness. Because of this, they are able to respond and adapt quickly to changing situations and circumstances. They leverage the three As in their approach to prospecting: adopt, adapt, adept. They actively search out and adopt new ideas and best practices, then adapt them as their own, and work at it until they become adept at execution. Fanatical prospectors are constantly trying new things and flexing with the w...

pontificating

your

customers are being called for cross-sell opportunities.

client. The approach was simple: “Hi, Roger, this is Jeb from XYZ agency.

The reason I'm calling is, in reviewing your current coverages, I noticed that you have your cars and home insured with us, but we don't have an umbrella liability policy set up for you. I want to schedule a short meeting with you to review your current situation and identify any coverage gaps that could create a risk for you and your family. How about Thursday morning at 11 AM?”

current client—someone who is already doing

hobgoblin

incredulous.

with

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. —Dale Carnegie

pipe: The Universal Law of Need

The 30-Day Rule The Law of Replacement

There

over again, deluding himself that this was prospecting

The Anatomy of a Sales Slump Ninety-nine percent of sales slumps can be linked directly to a failure to prospect. The anatomy of a sales slump looks something like this: At some point you stopped prospecting (see the 30-Day Rule). Because you stopped prospecting, your pipeline stalls (see the Law of Replacement). Because the prospects in your pipe are dead, you stop closing deals. As you experience this failure, there is an erosion of your confidence.

Your crumbling confidence creates negative self-talk and that further degrades your confidence, wrecks your enthusiasm, and causes you to feel like a loser. Feeling like a loser saps your energy and motivation for prospecting activity. Because you don't feel like prospecting, you call the same old dead-end prospects over and over and get nowhere. The lack of prospecting activity makes your already stale pipe even worse. You start hoping for silver bullets. But, because hope is not a strategy, nothing changes. You sink deeper into your slump, get desperate, and then bam! You get slapped by the Universal Law of Need. Your sales days become depressing black holes of misery. Early in my sales career I hit a bad slump. The previous quarter I'd closed a ton of new business and allowed myself to get caught up in the administrative work required to set up those new customers.

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 effectiveness of your sales activities. Efficiency is how much activity you are generating in the time block allotted for a particular prospecting activity. Effectiveness is the ratio between the activity and the outcome. Your drive is to optimize the balance between the two and maximize the outcome. Efficiency + Effectiveness = Performance (E + E = P) For example, you could be highly efficient in making prospecting calls on the phone. You are able to crush it and make 100 dials in an hour. But if those 100 dials result in no new information, no appointments, or appointments with low potential prospects (LPPs), then you were not effective and essentially wasted your time. Conversely, you could make 10 calls in the same period, setting one appointment with a highly qualified prospect and updating two records in your database. You would be more effective than the previous scenario but extremely inefficient because you wasted a ton of time and suboptimized your phone block. Without a doubt, there are dozens of variables that drive efficiency ...

even

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

“Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.” I've always believed that messy success is far better than perfect mediocrity. I'll beat the rep that spends a call block meticulously researching each prospect on any day by just picking up a targeted list and calling. Sure, I'll miss a few things here and there if I don't read every note in the CRM, but there won't be enough of a delta to compensate for the activity gap between me and the rep who gets everything perfect before making a single prospecting call. To be clear, I am not saying that researching or organizing your prospecting block is a bad idea. If you are calling C-level prospects, or you sell a complex and expensive product, it is a good idea to research your prospect in advance so that your message is relevant to their unique situation. Advance is the optimal word, though. Do research before and after the Golden Hours so that it does

not encroach on your prospecting block.