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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jeb Blount
Read between
February 22 - March 1, 2021
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.
The path to superstar-level success in sales is brutally simple. Simple, mind you, not easy.
What's the secret that separates superstars from everyone else, and why do they consistently outperform other salespeople? 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!
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.
Fanatical prospectors carry around a pocket full of business cards. They talk up strangers in doctors' offices, at sporting events, in line to get coffee, in elevators, at conferences, on planes, trains, and anywhere else they can get face to face with potential customers. 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.
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.
“easy is the greatest marketing hook of all time.”
It is critical that you awaken from the delusion that somehow you are going to be able to make prospecting easier and come to grips with the truth: If you had a choice between prospecting and swimming with sharks, you would choose the sharks.
In sales, easy is the mother of mediocrity, and in your life, mediocrity is like a broke uncle. Once he moves into your house, it is nearly impossible to get him to leave.
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
Developing a fanatical prospecting mindset starts with coming to grips with the fact that prospecting is hard, grueling, rejection-dense work.
you shouldn't wish that things were easier; you should wish that you were better.
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. —Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success
Mindset is completely and absolutely within your control and drives both the actions you take and your reactions to the environment and people around you.
I've spent a lifetime studying fanatical prospectors. Along the way I discovered seven core mindsets that define them.
Optimistic and enthusiastic: Fanatical prospectors have a winning, optimistic mindset.
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.
Confident: Fanatical prospectors approach prospecting with confidence. They expect to win and believe they are going to win.
Relentless: Fanatical prospectors have a high need for achievement. They do whatever it takes to reach their goal.
Thirsty for knowledge: Fanatical prospectors welcome feedback and coaching.
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 prospectors have the ability to execute with near-robotic and systematical efficiency. They are skilled at their craft like a pro athlete.
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.
If you want sustained success in your sales career, if you want to maximize your income, then you've got to interrupt prospects.
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.
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.
The pipeline always reveals the truth. Salespeople who gravitate to a single prospecting methodology seriously sub-optimize their productivity.
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.
If you work for a small company or a start-up, you'll need to balance your prospecting to both build your database with long-term opportunities and fill the pipe with deals you can close now.
If you are brand new in your territory, company, or industry, you must be prepared to pick up the phone and do lots of dialing or hit the streets and do lots of knocking.
Look around you. Find out what the top salespeople in your organization are doing to generate qualified prospects. Then do what they do.
Striking a balanced approach with prospecting is the most effective means of filling your sales pipeline no matter your industry product or service.
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
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.
There are three core laws of prospecting that, when heeded, will ensure that you are moving a steady stream of prospects into the pipe: The Universal Law of Need The 30-Day Rule The Law of Replacement
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.
When all of your hope for survival rests on one, two, or even a handful of accounts, the probability of failure increases exponentially.
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. Instead, you focus on what will happen to you if you don't get what you need, thereby attracting failure.
The next problem with desperate need is that other people can sense your desperation. Through your actions, tone of voice, words, and body language, you send the message that you are desperate and weak.
Finally, when you are desperate, you become emotional and act illogically, which causes you to make poor decisions.
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.
The implication of the 30-Day Rule is simple. Miss a day of prospecting and it will tend to bite you sometime in the next 90 days. Miss a week and you will feel it in your commission check. Miss the entire month and you will tank your pipeline, fall into a slump, and wake up 90 days later desperate, feeling like a loser, with no clue how you ended up there.
The Law of Replacement is a critical concept to internalize because failure to heed this law is the reason salespeople get on, and stay on, roller coasters. Up and down. Up and down. Until one day they get so far down that they can't get back up again.
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.
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
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the brutal reality that in sales it is not about what you have sold but rather what you have sold today.
