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

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.

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.

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.

Jim Rohn once said that you shouldn't wish that things were easier; you should wish that you were better.

Developing and maintaining a fanatical prospecting mindset is the ultimate key to success in sales. This mindset keeps you focused, persistent, and driven to open doors in the face of inevitable setbacks, challenges, and rejection. When you adopt a fanatical prospecting mindset, you'll grow in the face of adversity rather than shrink before it.

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.

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.

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

Desperation magnifies and accelerates failure and virtually guarantees that he won't close the deals he must have to survive.

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.

I stuck with it and by the end of the quarter, miraculously, I was the number-one sales rep in my region. The impact of daily prospecting on my performance that quarter—from zero to hero in just three months—made an indelible impression on me. It was a lesson I never had to learn again.

Your future does not lie in your past.

You will never reach peak performance until you know your numbers and use those numbers to make directional corrections.

The majority of salespeople don't track their numbers. Why? Because it is so much easier to delude themselves into thinking that they have made far more calls or prospecting touches than they have really made. The false comfort of delusion is warm and fuzzy and far more inviting than the cold edge of reality.

When you choose delusion over reality, you are making a conscious choice to not only lie to yourself but to lower your standards and performance. 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.

But

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.

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

Call reluctance is a common label that gets slapped on salespeople who fail to prospect. The term conjures up the image of a salesperson staring at the phone or at their prospect's front door—knees shaking, palms sweating, drenched in anxiety, unwilling to take the next step. Call reluctance is an easy label to apply because it seems to cover all sales sins. But some people aren't reluctant—they are just in the wrong job. If you are that person, so afraid to call that you can't will your fingers to dial the phone or your feet to move, so afraid of calling on strangers that you find it hard to go to work or even get out of bed—quit. Go do something else. This book won't help you. You don't have call reluctance, you are doing something you hate, and trust me on this: Life is too short to spend doing something you hate.

The CEO mindset is the most critical component of time, territory, and resource management. Unless and until you are willing to accept complete responsibility for owning your time, nothing else matters. When you adopt a CEO mindset, you choose to see yourself as the CEO of You, Inc.

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.

We minimize the downtime between calls by having our targeted call lists prepared and researched in advance (Platinum Hour work). We take notes during the block and wait until after the block concludes to log our calls and update the CRM—time that is blocked specifically for CRM activity. We also schedule blocks for e-mail and social prospecting.

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 efficiency decreases in direct proportion to the number of things you are attempting to do at one time.

You cannot be efficient when you are constantly being distracted.

Developing a defined objective makes you effective because on each prospecting call, e-mail, social media touch, networking event, or referral request, you know exactly what to ask for and how to bridge to your prospect's problems to give them a compelling reason to accept your request.

It is no different is sales. Each day salespeople waste time, energy, and emotion swinging at ugly deals. Deals that are unprofitable, unqualified, not in the buying window, don't have a budget, don't have an identified decision maker, or because of contracts don't have the ability to buy.

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

when you build more effective prospecting lists, with clear objectives, centered on specific prospecting channels, your prospecting blocks are easier, faster, more impactful, and generate far better results.

When you build powerful lists, you get powerful results.

Starting your day by calling the prospects on the top of your pyramid will deliver early wins. These wins give you confidence and motivation to attack the remainder of the sales day.

The most expensive thing you can do in sales is spend your time with the wrong prospect. —Jeb Blount

In sales the little things are big things and a well-managed CRM will prevent slip-ups that could cost you deals.

Here's the truth about the CRM: If you don't own it, you will never reach your true earning potential. Owning it means applying the CEO mindset we discussed earlier. It means: Being accountable for maintaining the integrity of your prospect database. Not waiting until your manager is screaming at you because you haven't updated a record in a month. Taking time to make copious notes following sales calls and logging those calls. Putting new leads in the system rather than carting around a pocket full of business cards you've collected from prospects. Rather than sitting around whining about how you don't understand the CRM, taking the time to learn it through trial and error and online learning tools.

Fanatical prospectors own their database. They own it because they get it. Their database is where targeted lists come from. Their database makes them more efficient and effective. It should be so important to you that you eat, sleep, and drink it.

fanatical prospectors believe that they are the CEO of their territory. They are working for themselves.

When it comes to building a powerful prospect database, my philosophy is simple: Put every detail about every account and every interaction with every account and contact in your CRM. Make good, clear notes. Never procrastinate. Do not take shortcuts. Develop the discipline to do it right the first time and it will pay off for you over time.

“Patricia, thank you again for your business. I'm glad to hear you are happy with us. I'm working hard to add more customers like you. Would you be able to introduce me to other people in your network who might want to use our product?”

Following up after networking events is the key to anchoring your new relationships and familiarity. Use handwritten notes to remind the other person of your conversation by referencing something you spoke about. I make it a habit to keep a stack of prestamped envelopes and thank-you notes in my car. I write my notes while the conversations are still fresh.

You want your professional presence online to position you as the one person who is most capable of bringing solutions to the table.

Your

The very best outcome of the investment you make in social media is to entice prospects to contact you. An inbound lead is much easier to convert into an appointment, sale, or qualifying information than an outbound prospecting call.

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.

download the Ultimate Guide to Strategic Prospecting at FanaticalProspecting.com. This comprehensive ebook gives you the tools and techniques for launching and managing effective SPCs that get results.

Everything

to add value, you must be valuable.

The right content shared at the right time with the right prospects can create important connections and convert passive online relationships into real-time conversations.

Instead of publishing your own original content, you leverage the content that is being created and published by others. Essentially, you become a maven who aggregates the most relevant content for your audience and shares it through your various social media newsfeeds.