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

Ensure that you are cross-linking each social profile page to your other profile pages along with any place you are blogging or contributing content.

Be sure to complete your entire profile.

Make a commitment to manage your online presence by reviewing, updating, and continuously improving all of your online profiles at least once a quarter.

Be aware that you are always onstage.

Sharing and publishing relevant content that is intriguing to prospects and helps them solve problems, answering questions in groups, and posting thoughtful comments can also open the door to prospects contacting you for more information or to ask you questions—especially when these posts position you as an expert.

For social search shortcuts, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Sam Richter's book, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling. Sam's book is the bible on using online and social resources to gather information.

There are five behaviors/activities that define social selling. Mastering these behaviors and activities makes the time spent on social channels effective.

Connections get you in the door and in front of the right people faster. When your connections introduce you to people inside of their network or company, your message has immediate relevance.

By sending them the connection request just after they've met you, they see your name again, anchoring familiarity. (Follow that connection request with a handwritten thank-you note and you're a superstar in their eyes.)

There are three ways to create connections: Direct: On both LinkedIn and Facebook you may initiate a direct request for a connection.

Reciprocal: With Twitter and Google+, you can gain connections by simply following people because when you follow, people will reciprocate and follow you back.

Passive: When you publish original or curated content that connects with your audience and is shared, people will connect with and follow you.

Publishing original content positions you as an expert.

I highly recommend investing the time to create and publish original content because the benefits to your reputation and career are massive.

to add value, you must be valuable.

In the social channel, the primary way you provide value is through content that educates, builds credibility, anchors familiarity, and positions you as an expert who can solve relevant problems.

There are three pillars of content curation: Awareness: You need to be aware of what is happening in your industry—trends, competitors, and movers and shakers. Have your eyes and ears open, pay attention to what is going on around you, and consume industry-specific information. Discover and follow the thought leaders who are shaping the dialog in your industry and know where great content is being published. Intent: When you curate with intent, you begin linking together relevant content based on an overall strategy, rather than just randomly and disparately sharing. You take time to read and understand what you are sharing, which allows you to add comments and insightful takeaways to the shared content, which further burnishes your expert status. Tools: Content curation is extremely time consuming, so you'll want to leverage tools that deliver relevant content to you and automate the distribution of the content you wish to share.

Social prospecting is a grind. It takes work. It is not easy, simple, or automatic.

Consistency is crucial. Social doesn't work if you show up some of the time.

You must block 30 minutes to an hour each day (preferably before or after the Golden Hours) to engage in planned, intentional social prospecting activities. Have the discipline to limit your activity to the block of time you have set aside for your social selling activities and no more.

Tools for social prospecting fall into five basic categories. Content curation: These tools help you easily find and/or bank new content to distribute on your social channels.

Content creation: Tools that help you create your own content abound.

Distribution: Posting content you create or curate to multiple social sites many times over each day is extremely time consuming and tedious. Distribution tools like HootSuite, Buffer, and HubSpot (very expensive) allow you to load the content you wish to share during nonselling hours and automate the distribution of that content on a set schedule. Set it and forget it.

Engagement: Tools like HootSuite, HubSpot, Bit.ly, and TweetDeck, along with the analytics tools embedded in the major social channels, allow you to view and analyze how people are engaging with your content and if that content is effective.

Intelligence: These tools help you gather information about companies, people, trigger events, and buying windows. My a...

If you are starting from the ground up with no followers or a small audience on established social platforms like LinkedIn, it can take from six months to two years to create enough gravity to pull prospects in to you.

Outbound prospecting and inbound social prospecting go together like mashed potatoes and gravy.

Salespeople are making egregious messaging mistakes on the phone, in person, via e-mail, and social media because they don't realize that prospects are not going to give up their time for: A product and service features dump An enthusiastic pitch about their company being “number one this” or the “biggest of that” Regurgitated lists of generic facts and figures Marketing brochures Information that is not relevant Or any of the other mindless crap that spews from the mouths and keyboards of salespeople

Prospects meet with you for their reasons, not yours. You must articulate the value of spending time with you in the context of what is most important to them.

One of the truths about human behavior is people tend to respond in kind. If you are relaxed and confident, you'll transfer that emotion to your prospect. If you want prospects to be enthusiastic about meeting you, be enthusiastic about meeting them. A relaxed, confident, enthusiastic demeanor and tone will open doors when nothing else will. Nonverbal communication includes: Voice tone, inflection, pitch, and speed Body language, facial expressions The way you dress and your outward appearance Sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, and the words used in written communication—e-mail, text messaging, and social messaging

Your prospecting message must be quick, simple, direct, and relevant. The relevant part is the critical element.

You lower the risk for your prospect by answering WIIFM—the most important question on their mind: What's in it for me?

In his book Smart Calling, Art Sobczak calls these assumptions about WIIFMs “Possible Value Propositions.” He suggests that for each class of prospect and decision-maker role, you should take time to define the possible reasons that would create enough WIIFM for them to give up their time to spend it with you.

being able to deliver powerful value propositions is the way to “pique curiosity and open doors.”

value proposition as “a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services. It's outcome focused and stresses the business value of your offering.”

three key parts to a winning VP: Focuses on a business objective that is measured: You'll get their attention when you focus on a metric that impacts their performance. Disrupts status quo: The status quo is powerful. People abhor change and will only move from the status quo when they feel they can significantly improve their current situation—increase sales, reduce costs, improve efficiency, reduce stress, and so on. Offers proof or evidence: When you can provide information about how much you have helped prospects in similar situations, you gain instant credibility.

I'm a fan of Mike Weinberg's Power Statements and sales story development process, detailed in his book New Sales. Simplified.

your Power Statement must answer: The prospect's issues Your offerings that address these issues Competitive differentiators

you need to answer the question, “Why do my customers choose to do business with me?”

Bridges connect.

your bridge is the because that gives them a good enough reason to give up their time to spend it with you.

Targeted bridges are bridges that are common to a large group of similar prospects—decision-maker roles, industry vertical, product or service application, and so on. Targeted bridges are most appropriate when you have little information about a specific prospect and the cost/benefit of doing reams of research is not worth it.

Strategic bridges are unique to a single high-value prospect and specific individual (decision-maker role) at that prospect. You will typically craft strategic bridges for enterprise level, conquest prospects, and C-level executives. Strategic bridges require research so that your bridge or because is specific and relevant, reduces risk, and gives them a compelling reason to give you their time.

To develop a bridge specific to your prospect, you will first need to determine the objective of your prospecting touch: Are you attempting to get more information to further qualify the opportunity, decision-maker role, or buying window? Do you want to set up an initial meeting? Are you seeking an introduction to another person?

The real secret to crafting prospecting messages that convert into meetings, information, or sales is staring with a simple but powerful premise: People make decisions based on emotion first and then justify with logic.

Prospects want to feel that you get them and their problems (emotional and logical), or are at least trying to get them, before they'll agree to give up their time to meet with you. They only give their up time because you offer them: Emotional value: You connect directly with them at the emotional level—typically by relating to painful emotions like stress, worry, insecurity, distrust, anxiety, fear, frustration, or anger and offering them peace of mind, security, options, lower stress, less worry, or hope. Insight (curiosity) value: You offer information that gives them power or leverage over other people. Most prospects worry about maintaining their competitive edge—either as a company or an individual. They're anxious that there may be something in the marketplace that they are not privy to. Unknowns are disconcerting—especially if a competitor has a best practice, information, system, or process that they don't. Tangible (logic) value: Executives and contacts in technical and data-centric roles will value data and case studies. How much, how many, and what results can you deliver, have you delivered, will you deliver—specific to their unique situation?

The most effective way to craft the right message is to simply stand in your prospect's shoes. Look at things through their eyes and use your God-given empathy to sense their emotions and to consider what might be important to them.

Start by answering these questions from your prospect's perspective: What would cause you stress? When do you feel stress? What makes you worry? When do you worry? Why do you worry? What creates anxiety? When do you feel anxiety? How do you feel when you run out of time for important things? How do you feel when you don't have enough money to accomplish your goals? When does this happen? How do you feel when you don't have enough resources to accomplish your goals? When does this happen? How do you feel when you don't have the knowledge to accomplish your goals? When does this happen? How do you feel when you fail to accomplish your goals? When do you get overwhelmed, and how does it feel? What impacts your peace of mind or sense of security? How would it feel to have limited options? What is causing you to feel frustrated or stuck? What makes you mad? What causes you to feel distrust? What causes you fear? What causes you anguish? How do you feel when ______ happens? What might you want to know? What unknown would make you worry? What information would you...

Here is the brutal truth: There is only one technique that really works for getting what you want on a prospecting touch. Ask.

Ask for the appointment, ask for information, ask for the decision maker, ask for the next step, ask for the sale. Ask for what you want. Ask.