Book Summary — Fanatical Prospecting

The Ultimate Guide for Starting Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email and Cold Calling

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The Ultimate Guide for Starting Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email and Cold Calling. Super practical, kick-ass book summarising how to stop wasting time and start selling.

The Case of Prospecting

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 and looking for their next opportunity. They prospect day and night — unstoppable and always on. Fanatical!

My favourite definition of the word fanatical is “motivated or characterised by an extreme, uncritical enthusiasm”.

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, email, 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.

The brutal truth: In sales you are owed nothing! You’ve got to get your ass up and go out there and make things happen yourself. You have to pick up the phone, knock on doors, make presentations, and ask for business. Sales is not a nine-to-five job. There are no days off. No vacations. No lunch breaks. The great salespeople are skipping meals and doing deals — whatever it takes to win.

The first step toward building an endless pipeline of new customers is acknowledging the truth and stepping back from your emotional need to find Easy Street.

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 impossible to get him to leave.

The next step is keeping it real. In sales, business, and life, there are only three things you can control:

1. Your Actions
2. Your Reactions
3. Your Mindset

That’s it. Nothing more. So instead of whining about the things that are out of your control, focus your energy on what you can control — your attitude, your choices, emotions, goals, ambitions, dreams, desires, and discipline (choosing between what you want now and what you want most).

There is no sugarcoating it. Prospecting sucks. This is why so many salespeople don’t do it and instead spend their time and energy seeking silver bullets.

Seven Mindsets of Fanatical Prospectors

Mindset is completely and absolutely within your control and drives both the actions you take and your reactions to the environment and people around you.

Success Leaves Clues

There is little need to reinvent the wheel. If you study what successful people do, you find patterns. When you duplicate those patterns, you’ll be able to duplicate their success.

Duplicate these mindsets:

1. Optimistic and enthusiastic
2. Competitive: hardwired to win
3. Confident: believe that they will win
4. Relentless: never give up believing
5. Thirsty for knowledge: welcome feedback and coaching, invest in themselves by reading, listening to podcasts, etc
6. Systemic and efficient: near-robotic and systematical efficiency
7. Adaptive and flexible: situational awareness

To Cold Call or Not Cold Call?

If you want sustained success in your sales career, you have to interrupt prospects. You’ll have to pick up the phone, walk in the door, send an email or text message.

Your prospect’s initial reaction to being interrupted — usually a brush-off or reflext response in a not-so-friendly tone of voice — feels like a rejection. As a human it is natural to abhor rejection; we are social creatures at heart who desire to be accepted.

It is not the “cold” call that is hard, it is the interrupting. Reps are just afraid to make the call, not the cold call.

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 anaemic.

Adopt a Balanced Prospecting Methodology

In sales, consistently relying on a single prospecting methodology at the expense of others, consistently generates mediocre results.

However balancing your prospecting regimen based on your industry, product, company, territory, and tenure in your territory gives you a statistical advantage that almost always leads to higher performance and income over the long term.

There should be a mixture of telephone, in-person, email, social selling, text messaging, referrals, networking, inbound leads, trade shows and cold calling.

The More You Prospect, the Lucker You Get

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

There are three core laws of prospecting:

1. The Universal Law of Need

The law governs desperation.

It states that the more you need something, the less likely it is that you will get it.

This law comes into play in sales when lack of activity has left your pipeline depleted.

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

The first reason is that desperation taps into the downside of the LAw of Attraction, which states that what you focus your thoughts on, you are most likely to get.

The next problem is that other people can sense your desperation. Through your actions, tone of voice, words, and body language, you send the message that you are desperate and weak.

Finally, when you are desperate, you become emotional and act illogically, which causes you to make poor decisions. These poor decisions exacerbate an already bad situation, leaving you stressed, miserable, and digging a deeper hole.

2. The 30-Day Rule

The 30-Day rule is almost always in play in B2B and high-end B2C sales. In shorte-cycle transactional sales, the 30-Day rule may become the “One-Week Rule”, but the concept remains the same.

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 internalise this rule, it will drive you to never put prospecting aside for another day.

3. The Law of Replacement

You must constantly be pushing new opportunities into your pipeline so that you’re replacing the opportunities that will naturally fall out. And, you must do so at a rate that matches or exceeds your closing ratio.

The First Rule of Sales Slumps

The first rule is if you are in one, stop digging, and the first rule of sales slumps is when you are in one, start prospecting. The only real way to get out of a sales slump is to get back up to the plate and start swinging.

Know Your numbers Managing Your Ratios

It’s a simple formula:

What (quality) you put into the pipe and how much (quantity) determines what you get out of the pipe.

Elite salespeople like elite athletes, track everything. You will never reach peak performance until you know your numbers and use those numbers to make directional corrections.

• Efficiency — how much activity you’re generating in a time block
• Effectiveness — ratio between the activity and outcome

The 3 Ps that are Holding You Back

Procrastinating

Procrastination is the grave in which opportunity is buried.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism is highly correlated with fear of failure and self-defeating behaviour, such as excessive procrastination.

Messy success is far better than perfect mediocrity.

Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.

Paralysis from Analysis

Don’t go on a ‘what if’ binge, just pick up the phone and call.

Disrupting the 3 Ps

• focus on making one call, then the next. Then the next.

Time — the great Equaliser of Sales

Top sales pros are masters at maximising prime selling time for… selling.

• adopt the CEO mindest — what is best for the org?
• don’t let your golden hour to be interrupted
• just say No to anything taking time in golden hour
• prioritise — never known a sales person who got fired for doing sales over non-sales activities
• Block the time in your calendar!

Delegate

Invest time in building relationships with your support staff

Time

• Parkinson’s Law — work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it
• Horstman’s Corollary — work contracts to fit into the time allotted

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 productivity.

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

Here’s the truth: you suck at multitasking!

Our brains don’t actually multitask — instead they cycle back and forth.

First do an hour of calling — THEN do the all the admin.

Beware the Ding — switch off all notifications in the Golden Hour.

Platinum Hour

Set aside another time for nonselling activities:

• building prospecting lists
• research
• precall planning
• developing proposals and presentations
• creating contracts
• email prospecting
• admin
• email
• calendar management
• CRM management

The 4 Objectives of Prospecting

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.

Know the objective of each call:

1. Set an appointment
2. Gather info and qualify
3. Close a sale
4. Build familiarity

• Complex, high value product → primary: set appointment, secondary: gather info, tertiary: build familiary
• Transactional, low risk → primary: closing the sale, secondary: gather info
• Tight budget windows → primary: build familiarity

Prospecting is a Contact Sport

To be effective you’ve got to know what you want and ask for it. To be efficient, you have to get as many prospecting touches as possible in your prospecting block.

You have no time to waste on small talk, chitchat, or long-winded scripts.

Set Appointment

• be specific, time, place
• get it in both of your calendars

Gather Info and Qualify

• don’t swing at nothing ugly → stop wasting your time
• define the strike zone — who is a good client?

Close the Sale

see later chapters (below)

Build Familiarity

Clients often need a lot of touchpoints, build familiarity with you, brand and company

Leveraging the Prospecting Pyramid

Segment your leads!

ie by potential or size of opportunity or probability of closing

Own Your Database — CRM

There is no weapon or tool in your sales arsenal that is more important or impactful to your long term income stream than your prospect database.

Own it like a CEO.

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.

The Law of Familiarity

The more familiar a client is with you, your company and brand the more likely he is to pick up your call and reply to your email.

Five levers of Familiarity

1. Persistent and Consistent Prospecting
2. Referrals and introductions — ask your best customers for them
3. Networking — they want to talk about themselves

People will forget what you said or did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.

4. Company and brand building

5. Personal branding — the secret: speak in public, regularly

Social Selling

You can’t exclusively social sell. You have to weave it into balanced prospecting.

People don’t want to be sold on social media. They prefer to connect, interact and learn.

Five C’s of Social Selling

1. Connecting — LinkedIn
2. Content Creation
3. Content Curation
4. Conversion — inbound leads
5. Consistency — set time aside every day

Message Matters

For every sale you miss because you’re too enthusiastic, you will miss a hundred because you’re not enthusiastic enough.

Nobody wants to be pitched — everyone hates it.

ie don’t say “can I have your time, to tell you about my company”

Your message must show a sincere interest in listening to them, learning about them, and solving their unique problems.

Delivery is key:

• enthusiasm and confidence (ie power posing, smile, etc)
• message: quick, direct and relevant

WIIFM — What is in it for me?

3 core elements of your message:

1. Focuses on business objective that is measured
2. Disrupts status quo
3. Offers proof or evidence

• give a reason (use “because”)
• ask for a favour (reciprocity)

Successful bridges build on frustration, anxiety, stress, fear and peace of mind.

Don’t forget to ask for what you want!

Then shut up and wait for them to speak.

Some good lines:

• The reason I’m calling is
• Tell me who — how — when — where — what
• I’m super busy bringing in new clients would 10am tomorrow work?
• Why don’t we go ahead and get that set up?
• I’ll be visiting a client not far from your office on…
• A lot of my customers are telling me that etc…

Fear of No

You have to teach your brain that a ‘No’ won’t kill you.

Telephone Prospecting Excellence

We see between 15–80% contact rate on phones depending on the industry. For example the business segment has contact rates of 25–40%.

The phone is the most efficient prospecting tool because when you’re organised, you can reach more prospects in a shorter period of time than through any other prospecting channel.

Make it a game.

Enjoy it.

ie make it competitive, count the ‘No’s’.

5 step phone plan:

1. Get their attention using their name “Hi Julie”
2. Identify yourself “My name is XX YY and I’m with company Z”
3. Tell them why you’re calling “ The reason I’m calling is to set up an appointment with you”
4. Bridge — give them a because “I just read an article online that said you’re adding 100 sales people, etc…”
5. Ask for what you want and shut up “I thought the best place to start is to have a short meeting — how about weds 3pm?”

There are no pauses! The moment you pause you lose control.

5 step voicemail callback:

1. Identify yourself
2. Say your phone number twice
3. Tell them the reason for the call
4. Give them a reason to call back
5. Repeat name and phone number twice

Bonus: keep the message under 30 seconds.

Looking for the best timing for calls or emails is just an excuse.

Swallow the frog in the morning if you want to encounter nothing more disgusting the rest of the day.

Just get it done!

Turning around RBOs

Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Rejection makes you feel that you cannot control a situation and therefore feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.

The feeling of rejection happens the moment you get a reflex response, brush-off, or objection (RBO). You feel like you’ve been punched in the gut. Your brain turns off and you stumble over your words.

Reflex Response

• “I’m just looking” — in clothing store

Brush Off

• someone telling you to bug off — nicely: “Call me later”

Objections

• comes with a reason and because

Plan for the RBO

They usually are:

• Not interested
• Don’t have the budget
• Too busy
• Overwhelmed
• Just looking (inbound leads)

Develop simple repeatable scripts for each one of them — the wording of the actual RBO might change, but it will fall into one of the buckets.

Practice and perfect the script — use a recording.

Turnaround Framework

• Disrupt vs Defeat

Don’t try to defeat the prospect. Disrupt the way this is going.

The key is the disruptive statement or question that turns them around so that they lean toward you rather than move away from you.

It’s a pull not push approach, because we encounter something we didn’t expect and pay attention.

1. Anchor — statement to hold on until your logical brain catches up
2. Disrupt — “take away” the fight (ie agree with them “awesome, if you’re happy you don’t even need to think about changing” acknowledge “I figured you’d be busy”, just send me info “tell me specifically what you’re looking for”, not interested “that makes sense. Most people aren’t” — don’t use “I understand”)
3. Ask —ask for the commitment again

When you get two RBOs and skill can’t close then graciously move.

Examples

• Look Jeb, I’m busy — “Nancy, that’s exactly why I’m calling you. (Anchor). I figured you would be so I wanted to find a more convenient time. (Disrupt).
• Not interested — “You know, that is what a lot of my current clients said the first time I called. (Anchor) Most people say that until they hear how much I can save them. (Disrupt).
• Happy with current provider — “That’s fantastic. (Anchor) Anytime you get great rates you shouldn’t think about changing. (Disrupt)

Gatekeepers

Seven keys of dealing with gatekeepers

• Be likeable
• Use please, please
• Be transparent
• Connect
• Hold the cheese — tricks don’t work
• Ask for help — authentic, honest plea
• Change the game:

1. Call early or late
2. Leverage social (social inboxes usually not monitored)
3. Meet them in person
4. Send an email
5. Send a handwritten note

Calling Other Extension Hack

• try other extensions — not reception, get transferred

Salespeople-Help-Salespeople Hack

• call the salesteam, ask them to help each other out — they feel your pain

In-Person Prospecting

Phone is better as more efficient, but if you do in-person visits — check the offices closeby and clients on the way — Plan ahead!

Email

1. Hook — compelling subject line and opening sentence
2. Relate — demonstrate you get them and their problem
3. Bridge — connect the dots of problem and WIIFM
4. Ask — be clear and straightforward

Text

For building familiarity

When it is time to go home, make one more call.

When you face your Goliath, when you set your goals, when you face fear, rejection and adversity, when you’re tired, worn out, and have the choice to go home or make one more call — the only question that really matters is:

How bad do you want it?

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Batko OS