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 first rule of sales slumps is when you are in one, start prospecting.

Don't spend a moment in thought about what might happen to you if you don't get what you need. Worry won't change the future.

The more you prospect, the luckier you get.

it is far more important that you prospect consistently than that you prospect using the best techniques.

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.

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.

One of the commonalities that I observe among top salespeople and fanatical prospectors across all market segments—inside and outside—is manual tracking of activity.

Reality is the realm of superstars, and joining reality is one of the first steps you'll need to take on the road to developing a fanatical prospecting mindset.

There are three mindsets that hold salespeople back from prospecting: procrastination, perfectionism, and paralysis from analysis.

Every major failure in my life has been a direct result of a collapse in my self-discipline to do the little things every day.

To be a fanatical prospector, you must develop the self-discipline to do a little bit of prospecting each day. You can't wait until the end of the year or even the end of the month to prospect. You have to prospect every day.

Procrastinating is easy, but the cost is great.

“Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried.”

“The great irony of perfectionism is that while it's characterized by an intense drive to succeed, it can be the very thing that prevents success.

perfectionism is the arch enemy of fanatical prospecting. It generates both procrastination and the fear of rejection (failure).

Advance is the optimal word, though. Do research before and after the Golden Hours so that it does not encroach on your prospecting block.

Call reluctance is a common label that gets slapped on salespeople who fail to prospect.

To succeed in sales, simply talk to lots of people every day. And here's what's exciting—there are lots of people! —Jim Rohn

Parkinson's Law states that work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it. Horstman's Corollary is the converse. It describes how work contracts to fit into the time allowed.

Time blocking is transformational for salespeople. It changes everything. When you get disciplined at blocking your time and concentrating your power, you see a massive and profound impact on your productivity. You become incredibly efficient when you block your day into short chunks of time for specific activities. You get more accomplished in a shorter time with far better results.

Power Hours work brilliantly for two reasons: Our work contracts to fit the time allotted, so we get more done in less time. Anybody can stay focused for an hour.

If you invest just an hour a day to make 25 to 50 teleprospecting calls and another hour for e-mail and social prospecting, I can absolutely and unequivocally guarantee that in less than 60 days, your pipeline will be packed.

Prospecting blocks should be scheduled or “blocked” on your calendar like any other commitment. They are appointments with yourself. The key to making prospecting blocks work is to treat them as sacred—in the same manner you view a set meeting with a customer, prospect, your boss, or an important event with your family.

Basic neuroscience refutes the delusional human belief that we are good at multitasking. Our brains don't actually multitask. Instead, when we are working on more than one thing at a time, our brain cycles back and forth between those things. It does this so fast that we have the illusion of multitasking. Which is why we suck at it.

The two biggest prospecting derailers for sales professionals are e-mail and mobile devices (text, social media, e-mail, web surfing, apps).

You cannot be efficient when you are constantly being distracted. Besides the distraction itself, it takes time to remember where you left off before you were distracted. This is why time blocking and concentrating your power inside those prospecting blocks will make you so much more productive. Placing your attention on one thing at a time is the key.

Blocking out the first one to two hours of each day for a focused telephone prospecting block is the mark of fanatical prospectors. This is why Anthony is so passionate about moving e-mail to a later time in your day. He explains that “once you open yourself to the demands of the outside world, it is very difficult to bring your full attention and focus to the most important tasks you need to complete each day and the most important task you need to complete each day is prospecting.”

You will rarely get an urgent e-mail first thing in the morning, and if you do, Anthony says it best: “If something is really important, they will call or text you on your mobile phone—not just send an e-mail.”

Top-earning sales pros set aside time early each morning or late each afternoon to attack important nonselling activities before the demands of the sales day kick in or after they've been addressed. They use the Platinum Hours for: Building prospecting lists Research Precall planning Developing proposals and presentations Creating contracts and getting approval Social selling activities E-mail prospecting Prospect research and call objective planning Planning and organization Administration and reports Responding to e-mail Calendar management CRM management The objective of the Platinum Hours is to set up your sales day so that all of your focus can be spent on high-value selling activities.

Know your worth. When you know what you are worth, you become acutely aware of the damage that doing $10-an-hour work (like data entry) during $50-an-hour prime selling time has on your income.

The Law of Triviality describes the human tendency to waste time on unimportant activities while mission-critical tasks are ignored. It's why so many salespeople allow nonselling activities to become an excuse for their failure to focus on selling activities.

Getting a bead on your worth is easy to do. Just take your annual income goal and divide it by the total number of Golden Hours in each year and you'll find what you are worth per hour. (Annual Income Goal)/(Number of Working Weeks × Golden Hours) = What You Are Worth an Hour Use this per-hour number as a gauge to determine whether a given task, activity, or assignment is moving you toward your goals or away from them.

Knowing your objective for each call makes you more efficient because you are able to build prospecting blocks and group your prospecting channel touches around those objectives. This allows you to move faster and make more prospecting touches in less time.

The objective is the primary outcome you expect from your prospecting touch. There are four core prospective objectives: Set an appointment. Gather information and qualify. Close a sale. Build familiarity.

If you are new in your territory or working for a start-up or new division, your primary objective will be gathering information so you can identify decision makers and qualify buying windows and budgets. The secondary objective will be to build familiarity.

Prospecting is not for building relationships, selling, or chatting up your buyer. It is for setting the appointment, qualifying, building familiarity, and when it makes sense, moving into the sales process right on the spot.

The most valuable activity in the sales process is a set appointment—no matter where you are in the pipe: initial meeting, discovery meetings, presentations, closing meetings, and so on.

It is only an appointment when it is on your calendar and your prospect's calendar and your prospect is expecting you to show up at a specific time, date, and place (physical or virtual).

Savvy sales professionals are super disciplined in qualifying prospects. They understand that time is money and it is a waste of time to work with prospects that are not going to buy.

It begins with gathering information during prospecting. While setting an appointment is your primary objective with prospects you have already prequalified as potential buyers, gathering information is your primary objective with prospects you have not qualified.

Your drive as a sales professional should always be to spend your time with the most qualified prospects in your database.

Set appointments with the prospects that are highly qualified and/or in the buying window Nurture the prospects that you've qualified but are not in the buying window Gather information on the prospects for which you have some or no data so you can qualify their potential and learn their buying windows Eliminate the prospect records that are bogus, out of business, too small, too big, or will never be buyers

Far too many companies (especially start-ups and small businesses), sales organizations, and sales professionals fail to develop a profile of a qualified prospect.

Once you have developed the profile of your ideal customer, you can develop the questions you'll need to qualify your prospects and identify the best opportunities. Next, make a commitment to measure every prospect, deal, and customer against this profile. When they don't fit, develop the discipline to walk away.

When you are selling transactional, low-risk, or relatively low-cost products or services and prospecting via phone and in-person channels, your primary prospecting objective is closing the sale right on the spot. If you are prospecting via e-mail, text, or social channels, your primary objective is to convert that prospecting touch into a sales conversation that leads to closing the sale.

Our data and data that we've gathered and analyzed from a diverse set of sources indicate that it takes, on average: 1 to 3 touches to reengage an inactive customer 1 to 5 touches to engage a prospect who is in the buying window and is familiar with you and your brand 3 to 10 touches to engage a prospect who has a high degree of familiarity with you or your brand, but is not in the buying window 5 to 12 touches to engage a warm inbound lead 5 to 20 touches to engage a prospect who has some familiarity with you and your brand—buying window dependent 20 to 50 touches to engage a cold prospect who does not know you or your brand These are general averages.

Familiarity plays an important role in getting prospects to engage. The more familiar a prospect is with you, your brand, and/or your company, the more likely they will be willing to accept and return your calls, reply to your e-mails, accept a social media connection request, respond to a text message, and engage when you are prospecting in person.

When you get into the office in the morning and begin your prospecting block, which prospects do you call or touch first?

Top performers have no interest in hunting and pecking for opportunities, so they design their lists to make prospecting blocks efficient and effective.

Top performers view their prospect database as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are the thousands of prospects they know little about other than a company name and perhaps some contact information. They don't know if the information about the prospect is correct (and there is a good chance that it isn't). Action: The goal with these prospects is to move them up the pyramid by gathering information to correct and confirm data, fill in the missing pieces, and begin the qualifying process. Higher up the pyramid, the information improves. There is solid contact information, including e-mail addresses. There may be information on competitors, product or service usage numbers, the size of the budget, and other demographic information. There may also be contact information for decision makers and influencers. Action: The goal with these prospects is to identify the buying window and all potential stakeholders. Moving higher up, potential buying windows have been identified. There are complete contact records for decision makers and influencers, including social profiles. Action: Your focus at this level is to implement nurturing campaigns to stay in front of confirmed decision makers in anticipation of an identified future buying window. Further up are conquest prospects. This is a highly targeted list of the best or largest opportunities in your territory. There will be a limited number: 10, 25, 50, 100. Action: The focus for conquest prospects includes nurturing and regu...