Fanatical Prospecting Book Summary - Fanatical Prospecting Book explained in key points

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Fanatical Prospecting summary

Name: Fanatical Prospecting
Rating: 4.5 (204 reviews)
Author: Jeb Blount

Jeb Blount

The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling

4.5 (204 ratings)

28 mins

Brief summary

Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount is a sales book that emphasizes the importance of prospecting to keep a consistent pipeline of leads. It provides practical advice and techniques for effective communication, reaching out to cold leads, and staying motivated.

Topics

Sales

Table of Contents

Fanatical Prospecting
Summary of 10 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 10

What’s in it for me? The ultimate pro’s guide to prospecting.

If you’ve looked at the sales-and-marketing section in your local bookstore lately, you’ll know that “gurus” promising you the world are a dime a dozen. Follow their pain-free, no-hassle 12-step plan, they claim, and you, too, can knock it out of the park without breaking a sweat.

But here’s the rub: sales is tough. The average salesperson experiences more rejection before 09:00 a.m. on a regular weekday than most people do in a year. Chasing down leads – the art of prospecting – requires dedication, a can-do attitude and a thick skin. Most importantly, if you’re not putting the hours in, you’ll go bust – it’s as simple as that.

That’s something Jeb Blount, a grizzled veteran of the frontlines of sales, knows better than most. His advice to would-be sales superstars? Stop drinking the Kool-Aid and get real. After all, sales isn’t magic – it’s part art, part science, and you can learn what it takes to prospect like a pro.

In these blinks, you’ll also learn

why you shouldn’t rely on a single sales methodology;
how to overcome your fear of rejection; and
why you should always put yourself in your clients’ shoes when you’re making a pitch.

The secret to sales success is simple: fanatical prospecting.

Sales are the lifeblood of business. Nothing happens until someone, somewhere, sells something. Call it the Law of Business. But here’s the odd thing – few people really understand how salesmanship works.

“Experts” are a dime a dozen, but the brutal truth is that their solutions rarely work. Why? Well, all too often they’re telling salespeople not what actually works but what they want to hear: that there’s a shortcut to success.

That’s always an attractive offer. “Easy,” as entrepreneur and author Joe de Sena points out, “is the greatest marketing hook of all time.” Whether it’s get-rich-quick schemes or magic diet pills promising effortless weight loss, we generally know that silver-bullet solutions are too good to be true. But that doesn’t mean we don’t fall for them anyway. Salespeople are often no different. When an expert tells them that the old-school approach of tracking down new sales is passé, they’re likely to believe it. And no wonder. After all, everyone dreams of immediate success, and the easier to achieve it, the better!

Here’s the thing, though: sales is hard work. Hitting your targets and closing deals takes time and dedication. Raw talent alone just doesn’t cut it if you’re not putting the hours in. That’s something sales superstars – the small minority who close the majority of all deals – intuitively understand.

After all, most of them have seen clever, ambitious and talented colleagues fail time and time again because they didn’t put in the legwork necessary for success. The real reason superstars earn more, take home the big bonuses and win prizes is this: they work harder, better and longer than the also-rans. They proactively pursue new clients, or prospects. This is called prospecting.

A dedication to chasing down leads that translate into future sales is what makes the best salespeople skip meals to make calls, interrupt their weekends to send out emails and put in extra shifts to knock on doors. Come evening, they’re using their downtime to hit social media to cultivate new contacts and network with potential clients.

In sales lingo, that’s known as keeping the pipeline full. If you’re not feeding new prospects in at one end of the pipe, you’re not going to get sales out at the other end. That’s something every fanatical prospector knows by heart. In the following blinks, we’ll take a closer look at these exceptional salespeople and their methods.

Fanatical prospectors aren’t scared of rejection, and they go out of their way to interrupt their prospects.

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.

Everyone hates telephone prospecting, but it’s an irreplaceable tool.

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.

Social media isn’t great for selling, but it’s still a powerful tool for prospectors.

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!

Procrastination, perfectionism and paralysis are every prospector’s worst enemies.

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.

The top salespeople adopt a mixed prospecting methodology.

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?

Obeying the three laws of prospecting is vital to keeping your pipeline full.

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.

Like elite athletes, prospectors follow the numbers to improve their performance.

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.

The prospecting pyramid can help you maximize your 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.

The key to crafting a persuasive pitch is telling your prospect what’s in it for them.

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.

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What is Fanatical Prospecting about?

Fanatical Prospecting (2015) is full of home truths and tips and tricks designed to help salespeople up their game – it’s the ultimate no-nonsense guide to salesmanship. The message is simple: If you want to make it as a sales superstar, you have to keep your pipeline full of leads. After all, no one’s going to hit a home run if they haven’t even made it up to the plate. Achieving this approach is exactly what these blinks will teach you how to do.

Best quote from Fanatical Prospecting

The enduring mantra of the fanatical prospector is: One more call.

—Jeb Blount

Who should read Fanatical Prospecting?

Salespeople in the trenches and executives surveying the battlefield
Entrepreneurs and self-starters tired of faddish, one-size-fits-all business “solutions”
Lateral thinkers looking for insights from different fields

About the Author

Jeb Blount is a sales-acceleration consultant with decades of experience on the frontlines of sales. In addition to being a best-selling author, he is a business coach and sought-after motivational speaker. He has been recognized as one of the Top 50 Most Influential Leaders in Sales and Marketing by Top Sales Magazine and one of the World’s Top 30 Social Selling Influencers by Forbes.

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