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by
Jeb Blount
Read between
March 19 - March 28, 2019
The difference between top performers and all of the other salespeople who are picking crumbs up off of the floor is top sales pros are masters at maximizing prime selling time for…selling.
You'll find an updated list of time and territory management tools at FanaticalProspecting.com.
Adopt a CEO Mindset
When you adopt a CEO mindset, you choose to see yourself as the CEO of You, Inc.
Fanatical prospectors adopt a CEO mindset. They believe that they and they alone are accountable for their own success or failure. They take complete responsibility and accountability for managing their time, territory, prospect database (CRM), and resources.
Protect the Golden Hours
Do important nonsales activities before or after the Golden Hours. There will always be nonselling activities that you must do to be successful in your job. Proposals, pre-call preparation, contracts, orders, reports, and CRM data entry are all important, but they are not sales activity. Do these things before and after prime selling time—in the Platinum Hours.
Follow up, follow up, follow up. Once you have delegated a task to your support team, you must provide consistent and ongoing communication and follow up. One of my favorite sayings is “In God we trust; everyone else, we follow up on.” If you fail to systematically follow up on tasks you have delegated, you'll find yourself scrambling at the last moment because critical tasks were left undone or incomplete.
Never forget that the people on your support staff are human—just like you. Show them you care, listen, give them the same respect that you expect in return, and, above all, say thank you.
Blocking Your Time Will Transform Your Career
Before they could launch into more excuses, I gave them 10 minutes to go to their offices and pull together a list of 50 prospects and meet me back in the training room when they were done. Ten minutes later, with lists in hand, I gave them 30 minutes to call 25 prospects with a goal of setting two discovery appointments. The stunned look on their faces told the whole story. They fidgeted in their seats and stared at their phones. Two people said they felt better calling in their office. I wasn't budging. No more excuses. So with a little more prodding, they got down to work. Thirty minutes
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Horstman's Corollary
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. I simply changed the paradigm the reps were working under—instead of giving them an entire day to make their prospecting calls, I gave them 30 minutes.
We schedule our prospecting blocks into three “Power Hours” that are spread across the day—morning, midday, and afternoon. During Power Hours we do nothing but make teleprospecting calls. We stay off of e-mail and remove all other distractions. We don't do research, allow ourselves to get sucked into CRM management, drift off into social media sites, or accept any excuses. We don't take breaks to get coffee or go to the restroom.
Don't get me wrong. It is intense, draining, rejection-dense work. We make calls as fast as we possibly can. However, 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.
Stick to Your Guns
Prospecting blocks should be scheduled or “blocked” on your calendar like any other commitment. They are appointments with yourself.
Concentrate Your Power
What makes prospecting blocks so productive is the concentration of all of your power on a single focus.
You secretly know you suck at multitasking, so why not just admit it? That makes it so much easier to see the truth about your prospecting blocks: You are making maybe one prospecting touch every three to five minutes because you've got so many things going on at once. Prospecting efficiency decreases in direct proportion to the number of things you are attempting to do at one time.
Beware of the Ding
Laura abandoned the prospecting call she was about to make, looked down, and reached for her phone. The sound it had just made compelled her to check it. Two text messages, a Facebook post, and a YouTube video later, she finally shifted her attention back to her prospecting list but couldn't remember where she'd left off. Seven minutes had gone by since she'd looked down at her phone. She was oblivious.
The two biggest prospecting derailers for sales professionals are e-mail and mobile devices (text, social media, e-mail, web surfing, apps).
This means that during prospecting blocks or building proposal blocks or follow-up call blocks or whatever block you are in, you need to turn everything else off. Schedule alternate time blocks for dealing with e-mail, watching cat videos, or hanging out on Facebook.
What Lurks in Your Inbox Can and Will Derail Your Sales Day
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.
Leverage the Platinum Hours
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
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Measure 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.
It's not uncommon for salespeople to waste 50 percent or more of their time on low-value activities.
9 The Four Objectives of Prospecting
There are four core prospective objectives: Set an appointment. Gather information and qualify. Close a sale. Build familiarity.
If you are selling a transactional, low-risk, low-cost product and you are in outside sales and prospecting via any channel other than in person (phone, e-mail, text, social), your primary objective will be to set an appointment and secondarily to gather information. If you are prospecting in person (“knocking” on the prospect's door), your primary objective will be to close the deal.
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. You don't need brilliant scripts. You don't need complex strategies. You don't need to overcomplicate it.
Set an Appointment
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.
Delusion gets you nowhere. So here is a simple rule: 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).
Gather Information and Qualify
Your drive as a sales professional should always be to spend your time with the most qualified prospects in your database. This means that you will want to: 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
Define the Strike Zone
If you don't define the strike zone, you will waste a lot of time chasing ugly deals.
The end goal is keeping your pipeline full of viable, qualified deals that have a high probability of closing. This is why fanatical prospectors use daily prospecting activity to systematically qualify their databases.
Close the Sale
On the phone or in person, where you have the highest probability of a one-call close, this means you have to quickly get past the initial reflex response or brush-off, ask one or two questions to qualify the opportunity, and gain agreement for an appointment on the spot that gives you the space to ask deeper questions, bridge to a solution, and close the sale.
It all happens in the span of a few minutes and it requires poise, confidence, and a fundamental mastery of the sales process.
The techniques for closing the sale on a prospecting call (one call close) are beyond the scope of this book. However, we'll discuss the techniques you'll need to get past the initial pushback and objections from your prospect and m...
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Build Familiarity
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
