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.
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.
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.
The lesson the Law of Replacement teaches is that 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. This is where a fanatical prospecting mindset really begins to pay off.
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.
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.
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.
If you are selling a complex, high-risk, high-cost product or service, your primary objective will most often be an appointment with a qualified decision maker, influencer, or other stakeholder who can help you move the deal forward. Your secondary objective will be to gather information. Your tertiary objective will be to build familiarity.
Desperation magnifies and accelerates failure and virtually guarantees that he won't close the deals he must have to survive.
Blocking out the first one to two hours of each day for a focused telephone prospecting block is the mark of fanatical prospectors.
One of the commonalities that I observe among top salespeople and fanatical prospectors across all market segments—inside and outside—is manual tracking of activity. They each have their own style and means of tracking their numbers, but the one thing they all know is exactly where they stand.
We like to think of our champions and idols as superheroes who were born different from us. We don't like to think of them as relatively ordinary people who made themselves extraordinary.
Parkinson's Law states that work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it. Horstman's Corollary is the converse. It describes how work contracts to fit into the time allowed.
There are three mindsets that hold salespeople back from prospecting: procrastination, perfectionism, and paralysis from analysis.
Systematic and efficient: Fanatical prospectors have the ability to execute with near-robotic and systematical efficiency.
If you want sustained success in your sales career, if you want to maximize your income, then you've got to interrupt prospects.
“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?”
Top sales professionals spend as much as 80 percent of their time on prospecting and qualifying activities for one important reason: They want to get up to the plate often and put together a consistent string of singles, doubles, triples, and a few home runs.
When it is time to go home, make one more call.
Delusion gets you nowhere. So here is a simple rule: It is only an appointment when it is on your calendar and your prospect's calendar and your prospect is expecting you to show up at a specific time, date, and place (physical or virtual).