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 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.