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.