Fanatical Prospecting summary

There’s no sugarcoating it: prospecting isn’t fun. In fact, as the author knows from his experience on the frontlines of sales, it usually sucks. The reason? When you get down to it, prospecting is basically about reaching out to people who aren’t expecting you to contact them. If you want to sell something, you’re going to have to interrupt your prospect’s day.

And that’s difficult and awkward. When you make a call or send off an unsolicited email, you don’t know how the person on the receiving end is going to respond. Often enough, you’ll be met with annoyance and a brush-off. That’s tough. After all, humans are hardwired to seek approval and recognition; few things sting as badly as being rejected.

Here’s a joke the author sometimes tells at conferences. Question: How do you get a salesperson to stop working? Answer: Put a phone in front of him. As we’ve seen, dialing prospects is tough. In fact, most salespeople will tell you it’s the most stressful part of their job, and there are few things they’ll go to such lengths to avoid. The thing is, however, calling simply works. Not only that, it’s a whole lot more efficient than the alternatives.

Phone contact rates – the percentage of leads successfully contacted per hundred calls – are much higher than for email, and they’re light years ahead of social selling. Better still, stats collected since the 1990s show that contact rates have risen in business in general by 5 percent. That might sound counterintuitive in the age of social media, but there are some pretty compelling reasons for the continued relevance of phone prospecting. Modern phones are usually tied to people rather than desks, for one. Then there’s the fact that so much business has moved online: callers stand out because so few people ring, not to mention the personal touch that hearing a human voice provides.

If you keep up with the latest trends in sales, you’ll have heard plenty of excited talk about social selling. Social media has transformed the world we live in, so why shouldn’t leveraging its powers also revolutionize sales? Well, it just might, but not in the way many people imagine.

Let’s clear up a misconception. Selling on social media isn’t a magical solution, and it won’t replace other types of prospecting. Conversion rates from calls and emails are much higher than those from social media channels. When a social media expert cold-called the author’s company to pitch her social media-based program, his VP asked her a simple question: “If your program is so good, why are you calling me?” It seems even the prophets of social selling realize that nothing beats old-fashioned phone prospecting!

Fear of rejection isn’t the only thing that stops salespeople from prospecting. In fact, would-be stars are often hamstrung by one or more of the three deadly sales sins – the three Ps. These stand for procrastination, perfectionism and paralysis.

Let’s start with procrastination. There’s nothing easier in the world than putting things off and saying, “I’m tired, I’ll get to that tomorrow.” It’s a small slip that at the time seems manageable – after all, you can always make up that half hour you’d set aside for calling clients, right? Well, no. If you’ve heard the children’s riddle that asks the best way to eat an elephant, you’ll know the answer is “one bite at a time.” Miss those small, daily steps that carry you toward your ultimate goal and you’re likely to find yourself trying to eat the thing whole in one panicked last-minute sitting.

Imagine your friend asks you for some investment advice. He tells you about a talk he attended where a financial whizz presented a stock option that’s guaranteed to make a ton of money. Now he’s thinking of investing his entire savings and wants to know what you think. You’d probably advise him to be careful, right? After all, there’s a reason seasoned investors hedge their bets and diversify their portfolios – they want to avoid getting wiped out overnight!

That also applies in sales. Putting all your eggs in one basket is asking for trouble. So why do salespeople do it?

The priority for every salesperson is to keep their pipeline full of prospects. That’s why the best sales professionals spend up to 80 percent of their time prospecting. They know that increasing the chances of hitting a home run entails stepping up to the plate as often as possible. So, in this blink, we’ll take a look at the three laws of prospecting to help you do just that.

Let’s start with what the author calls the Universal Law of Need. This states that the more you need something, the less likely you are to get it, and it’s what every struggling salesperson looking down the barrel of an empty pipe dreads. The fewer the deals coming through your pipeline, the more desperate you get. That’s a problem. Desperation clouds your judgment and leads to bad calls, further increasing your chance of failure. Even worse, desperation stinks. Clients can smell it a mile off, and there’s no bigger turn-off than a salesman haunted by the idea of going bust.

In ultracompetitive sports, tiny differences like a handful of seconds or a few centimeters are all that separates winners from runners-up. That’s why top athletes are obsessed with stats; they understand that the numbers will tell them where they currently are and which small margins they need to tweak in order to improve.

Top salespeople follow data and track everything for the same reason. Contacts, appointments, responses, closing rates and emails sent and received – all of it is carefully recorded and analyzed. The only difference is the kind of information they’re after. What really matters in sales is efficiency and effectiveness.

In 2014, a company struggling to hit its targets hired the author as a consultant. As usual, he started out by observing the sales team in action. It was a modern office, with the latest computerized customer-relationship-management system giving the salespeople plenty of data on prospects. How, he asked the reps, did they decide who to call first? The answer revealed the problem: they were dialing at random!

It’s not uncommon for salespeople to think of their database as a grid filled with equally valuable prospects, but that’s a fallacy. In fact, there’s no better way of wasting your time. To work smart, you need to be efficient and effective, and you need to prioritize. That means vetting prospects according to the size of the opportunity and the probability of converting them into a sale. What that gives you isn’t a square, but a pyramid.

Every salesperson dreams of a pitch so smooth it makes prospects swoon, a magical open sesame that unlocks every client’s hidden treasures. But that’s just a fantasy. In the real world, you need to learn to craft a persuasive pitch. It might not throw the gates open, but it will get your foot in the door.

The best place to start is to put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. It’s a busy day at the office, you’ve got a thousand things to do and now there’s someone on the phone asking for your time. What’s the last thing you need right now? Chances are, you don’t want to hear generic facts and inflated claims about some product being the best thing since sliced bread. Yet that’s what lots of salespeople lead with. Frankly, it’s a wonder their prospects stay on the line half as long as they do! No, what you’d want to hear would be quick, to the point and squarely tailored to your needs as a buyer.