# Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-12: The Law of Familiarity - **Source**: /library/Fanatical Prospecting/source-file.pdf - **PDF pages**: 114–122 - **Pages without text**: none --- 12 The Law of Familiarity After seeing a lot of the world, I now tend to return to the same spots. I enjoy the familiarity. —Louise Nurding The more familiar a prospect is with you, your brand, and/or your company, the more likely they will be to accept and return your calls, open your e-mails, accept a social media connection request, respond to a text message, accept an invite to an event or webinar, download information from a link you sent them, engage in sales conversations, and ultimately do business with you. That’s the Law of Familiarity. This is supported by data that indicates that it can take between 20 and 50 touches to engage a prospect with little to no familiarity with you or your company, but just 1 to 10 touches to engage an inactive customer, warm inbound lead, or prospect 96 who has a high degree of familiarity with you, your company, or your brand. The lack of familiarity is why you get so many objections to your requests for your prospects’ time. When prospects don’t know you, it’s much harder to get in the door. Prospecting Lubrication This is why it’s in your best interest to invest time and effort to build familiarity with your prospects. Familiarity lubricates prospecting because it makes the prospect’s decision to give you their time feel less risky. There even comes a point when a prospect will readily com- municate and build a “first-name” relationship with you—even when they aren’t interested in buying at the moment. Sean Burke, CEO of KiteDesk, calls this the Familiarity Threshold. When you earn enough trust to cross the familiarity threshold, you also gain the ability to communicate more freely—including through social media inboxes and text messaging—without being considered intrusive. You won’t cross the familiarity threshold with most of your prospects because you’ll never have enough time to make that level of investment with all of them. Crossing the familiarity threshold requires a significant investment of time, intellect, emotion, energy, and technology. This is why you must create your conquest lists and develop strategic prospecting plans so you focus your time and attention on building familiarity with your most valuable prospects. The Five Levers of Familiarity The familiarity threshold is also why the senior reps in your organization—the ones who’ve been in the same territories for The Law of Familiarity 97 years—make it look so easy. The years of investment they’ve made in building familiarity in their territory have paid off. If you were to take a closer look at their efforts, you’d discover that there were five levers that helped them build familiarity over time. Persistent and Consistent Prospecting The firststepincreatingfamiliarityisthroughpersistentand consistent daily prospecting. Each time you call, e-mail, meet face to face, drop offa businesscard, andleavea voice mail,you createfamiliarity.Thisis one of the core reasons persistence pays off. The more times they see or hear your name, the more familiar you become to them and thegatekeepersthatprotectthem.Simplyput,themoreyouprospect, the more familiar you become to your prospect base. Referrals and Introductions “Ron, you mentioned that you still have close ties to your former company. Do you know who makes the decisions on sales training over there?” I was speaking with the decision maker at one of my top clients. “Yep. That’s Mary Walker. She used to work for me. Great lady, you’ll like her.” He looked down at his phone. “Let me get you her number.” A few seconds went by and he gave me her contact information. Then I asked, “Would you mind giving her a call and making an introduction?” He looked up from his phone and said, “Sure, no problem.” Then he dialed, got Mary on the line, and said, “I’m standing here with a guy named Jeb Blount. He’s been helping us with developing our sales training curriculum. You two need to meet. He’s going to be giving you a call.” 98 Fanatical Prospecting The most powerful and direct path to familiarity is a referral or introduction. The referral gives you instant credibility because you get to ride on the coat tails of a person who is already trusted by your prospect. There are three basic types of referrals: 1. Customer referrals come from happy clients that trust you. The key to generating these referrals is developing a disciplined, systematic process for asking for referrals. 2. Personal referrals come from friends, family, and acquaintances. These are people who know you and are willing to send prospects your way. Take time to educate your personal connections on what you do and your ideal prospects so they know what to look for. Then (this is critical), keep reminding them so they don’t forget about you. 3. Professional referrals come from relationships you’ve developed with other professionals in related industries or with sales- people who may call on the same type of prospects but don’t compete with you. These are typically mutually beneficial relationships. To generate these referrals, you must seek out, form, and make an ongoing investment in these professional relationships. The wider your professional network, the more referrals you’ll generate. I’ve read dozens of books on referrals. These books offer excellent advice, techniques, and tips for generation referrals. For the sake of time, I’ll give you a short synopsis of the core message that is common to every one of these books. The real secret to generating referrals is: ■ Give a legendary customer experience. ■ Ask. That’s it. Straightforward and simple. Yet, while standing in front of a group of B2B sales reps last month, I asked: “How many of you provide great service to your customers? Raise your hand.” Every hand in the room went up. The Law of Familiarity 99 “How many of you asked for at least one referral last week?” No hands went up. “How about in the last month?” Again, no hands. “How about in the last quarter?” One hand went up. “How about the last year?” Three hands up out of a hundred salespeople. Shocking? Not really. I ask this question to groups of salespeople regularly. The response is always the same. I’m not going to waste your time discussing why salespeople don’t ask because that answer is more than obvious: They either fear getting turned down or they just don’t think of it. It’s relatively easy, low key, and low risk to ask a happy client for a referral. It goes like this: “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?” Yes, there are more strategic and powerful ways to ask. Yes, there are ways to make it easier for your customers to help you with referrals. What’s most important, though, is the discipline to ask. Networking There are opportunities to network in your community or in your territory every week. The first place to check with is the chamber(s) in your territory. Then Google or Bing the calendars of other business and civic organizations in your area. Finally, ask your prospects and customers which events, conferences, and trade shows they attend. Then go! Can I make this any clearer? Go shake hands. Go meet people. Go learn about them. You’ll get leads and referrals, and 100 Fanatical Prospecting nothing builds familiarity better than face-to-face contact. We’ll talk about social prospecting and social media in the next chapter, but networking is the real social prospecting. To be successful at networking, refrain from becoming a walking, talking marketing brochure and get it through your thick skull that nobody cares about you or what you have to say. They want to talk about themselves. You don’t go to networking events to sell. You are not there to set appointments, get leads, or close business. You are there to create connections with other people. You get those other things after the connections are established. There should be no quid pro quo attached to your conversations. You create connections when you ask questions, listen, and become genuinely interested in other people. Maya Angelou said, “People will forget what you said or did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” Take this to heart as you invest time in networking events. Following up after networking events is the key to anchoring your new relationships and familiarity. Use handwritten notes to remind the other person of your conversation by referencing something you spoke about. I make it a habit to keep a stack of prestamped envelopes and thank-you notes in my car. I write my notes while the conversations are still fresh. When I’ve had a positive conversation, I will also send a short text to thank the person for taking time to speak with me, followed by a LinkedIn connection request to further anchor familiarity. Finally, I log any leads in my CRM no later than the next morning. If I promised to send something, schedule an appoint- ment, or introduce them to someone else, I schedule a task and take action within 24 hours of the event. Then I follow up on a regular basis until I move my networking prospects into the pipeline. The Law of Familiarity 101 Company and Brand Familiarity Here’s the good news. If you are lucky enough to work for a well-known company or sell a recognized brand, prospecting is exponentially easier than it is for the rep selling for a start-up or small, unknown company. In some cases, all you need to do to strike up a conversation or set an appointment is to mention your company’s name or product. The large company marketing machine is always at work, driving brand recognition and generating leads through traditional advertising, social media, content marketing, trade shows, and conferences. This gives the rep who works for a big company with a big brand a decided advantage in the war for their prospects’ attention. If you work for a start-up, emerging brand, or a small, unknown company without a sustained marketing strategy, you are almost always at a disadvantage. It is much harder to get people to meet with you when they are not familiar with your company. For this reason, small company and start-up sales teams are intrinsically an integral part of the brand-building and market- awareness process. In conjunction with (or in some cases in spite of) limited marketing resources, you must actively participate in getting the word out. You may be called on to—and I suggest, volunteer to—write and post relevant blogs, be an active part of trade shows, build and leverage your social media network, contribute to white papers and e-books, create podcasts, and host webinars. And when it comes to social media, you can generate massive brand awareness to a targeted audiencebycommittingto beingactive,growing your network, and sharing content. The bottom line is, when you are in a small organization, it is almost always all hands on deck and it is a given that sales and marketing are a mash-up rather than separate silos. 102 Fanatical Prospecting For reps who work for a well-recognized brand, the key is staying out of the gears of the marketing machine and allowing marketing to do its job. Personal Branding Familiarity is also built through personal branding—making a direct investment in improving the awareness of your name, expertise, and reputation. This is the ultimate way to build familiarity because people buy you. They buy you and trust you because they believe that you are the only person who can solve their unique problem. Never in the human experience has it been easier to build familiarity through personal branding. Today distributing content is easy. Just jump on your favorite social network and go to town. Point, shoot, write, click, and publish—it’s all at your fingertips. You can get your name and reputation out there fast and for very little cost. There is, however, a personal branding methodology that is so little used, I consider it a secret weapon in the war for familiarity. It has an extraordinary track record for producing results and creates instant familiarity, credibility, and leads. The secret: Speak in public, regularly. Public speaking is a powerful method for meeting people and developing business relationships because it creates an environment where prospects seek you out. When you speak in public, at least for a moment, you are considered a minor celebrity who people want to meet. After you give your speech, people walk up to you, engage you in conversa- tions, freely reveal their business issues, and voluntarily hand over their contact information. You can easily get speaking gigs. Organizations like the cham- ber of commerce, Rotary Club, trade organizations, and other The Law of Familiarity 103 business and civic groups are always in need of guest speakers. All you really have to do is call and volunteer and they will happily put you on the schedule. If you attend trade shows and association meetings, just call the meeting planners and tell them you would like to be a speaker or deliver a workshop. These folks are on the lookout for subject matter experts to add value to their programs. Although less effective, you can also speak on webinars and live streaming events put on by industry trade associations and your own company. Speaking allows you to showcase your knowledge. It also gives you tremendous visibility and credibility. And because so few of your competitors do it, it will set you apart, enhance your personal brand, and create a greater sense of familiarity with your prospects. Warning The information in this chapter comes with a warning. It is easy to spend all of your time creating familiarity. If you do this in place of other prospecting activities, you’ll wake up a month from now with an empty pipe and a screaming, pissed-off boss. Like everything in sales, building familiarity is about balance. You’ve got to balance the need for sales today with an investment in the future. 104 Fanatical Prospecting