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Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-05: The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get
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5 The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get 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. —Dale Carnegie The unrelenting daily imperative for every salesperson is keeping the pipeline full of qualified prospects. 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. There are three core laws of prospecting that, when heeded, will ensure that you are moving a steady stream of prospects into the pipe: 25
- The Universal Law of Need
- The 30-Day Rule
- The Law of Replacement In this chapter, we discuss the implications of these universal laws for success in sales. You will also learn why ignoring these laws causes sales slumps and how to get out of a slump if you find yourself in one. The Universal Law of Need It is when pipelines are empty that salespeople find themselves face to face with the Universal Law of Need. The Universal Law of Need governs desperation. It states that the more you need some- thing, the less likely it is that you will get it. This law comes into play in sales when lack of activity has left your pipeline depleted. When all of your hope for survival rests on one, two, or even a handful of accounts, the probability of failure increases exponentially. ConsiderJerry.Hisprospectingisinconsistentatbest.Severalofthe deals he was counting on and put into his forecast pushed off decisions to next quarter or were lost to a competitor. Because of this, he has only a handful of viable opportunities left in his pipeline. Now, with the end of the quarter looming, Jerry is under tremendous pressure. He desperately needs one of these deals to close. As Jerry becomes more desperate to close anything, he comes face to face with a cruel reality: Desperation magnifies and accelerates failure and virtually guarantees that he won’t close the deals he must have to survive. There are several reasons why desperation increases the proba- bility that Jerry will fail when he needs to succeed the most. The first is that desperation taps into the downside of the Law of Attraction, whichstatesthatwhatyou focusyourthoughtson,youare mostlikely toget.Whenyou are desperate,younolonger focusyourthoughtson what is required for success. Instead, you focus on what will happen to you if you don’t get what you need, thereby attracting failure. 26 Fanatical Prospecting
The next problem with desperate need is that other people can sense your desperation. Through your actions, tone of voice, words, and body language, you send the message that you are desperate and weak. Prospects and customers naturally repel salespeople who are needy, desperate, and pathetic. Instead, they gravitate toward sales professionals who exude confidence. When you reek of the foul stench of desperation, people don’t want to do business with you. Finally, when you are desperate, you become emotional and act illogically, which causes you to make poor decisions. These poor decisions exacerbate an already bad situation, leaving you stressed, miserable, and digging a deeper hole. In contrast to Jerry, Sandra is consistently prospecting, network- ing, gaining referrals, and systematically moving her accounts through her pipeline. Her hard work has resulted in more than 30 opportunities in her funnel. Will they all close? Not likely. However, Sandra feels little pressure. She is consistently replacing the prospects that fall out of her pipeline and as a result, her sales have been regular, predictable, and on target. She knows exactly what she will close tomorrow, next week, and next month and she has earned her sales manager’s trust because she keeps her forecast promises. Under little pressure, she gets a huge boost when several of the accounts in her pipeline that were long shots suddenly go her way. She blows away her quota and earns a huge bonus. Sandra didn’t need this extra sales gravy, yet, because she was disciplined in her activity, it fell right into her lap. The 30-Day Rule “Hey, Jeb, got a minute?” The voice on the line was familiar. “Sure, Greg, what’s up?” Greg is a sales pro who lives in my town. We’ve known each other for years. “I was wondering if you might have a minute to talk.” The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get 27
I was stuck in traffic on the parking lot called I-285 in Atlanta and had nowhere to go, so Greg started telling me his story. He explained that for some reason nothing he was working on was closing. He was getting frustrated, feeling that he’d lost his edge, and looking for tips that would help him get some deals closed. It was early March and he was worried that he was going to end up having a bad quarter. Slumps can quickly erode confidence and create a feeling of desperation. “Greg,” I asked, “just by chance are you calling the same prospects over and over? And are these prospects the same ones you were trying to close in February?” “Yes. They keep putting me off. I was wondering if you might have some closing techniques or something I can say to get them to pull the trigger.” “Greg, this is going to sound like a weird question, so bear with me. How much were you working in December?” “Well, we had a lot going on in December and I didn’t get in as much time as I had hoped. We also took a couple of weeks off at the end of the year. You know how it is around the holidays.” “So you weren’t doing as much prospecting as usual?” There was silence on the other end of the line. “Oh, crap, Jeb— the 30-Day Rule! I didn’t even see it.” Greg didn’t have a closing problem; he had a prospecting problem. He’d stopped prospecting in December and it was biting him in the rear in March. However, because his activity gap happened way back in December, he didn’t immediately connect it to his slump in March. To him it felt like a closing issue. Because he treated his slump as a closing technique issue rather than a prospecting issue, he continued to call on stale, dead-end prospects over and over again, unwilling to mentally admit that those deals were never going to close. That is when he started to dig the hole even deeper. The irony was, as his frustration at not closing sales increased, he stopped prospecting altogether. Instead he just called the same old prospects 28 Fanatical Prospecting
over and over again, deluding himself that this was prospecting activity. This death spiral is common and happens to the best salespeople. Let’s get real: It’s hard to find the energy and motivation to start prospecting when you feel like a loser. As this cycle continued, Greg failed to replace the stale prospects with new opportunities, became more desperate, hit a slump, and started looking for a silver bullet that would solve his problem. That is when he called me looking for top-secret closing techniques that would save him. In December Greg stopped prospecting because it was easy to become distracted during the holidays with things that are way more fun than prospecting. Ninety days later his pipeline was stale and stalled. This is what happens when you ignore the 30-Day Rule. The 30-Day Rule is almost always in play in B2B and high-end B2C sales. In shorter-cycle transactional sales, the 30-Day Rule may become the “One-Week Rule,” but the concept remains the same. 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. The implication of the 30-Day Rule is simple. Miss a day of prospecting and it will tend to bite you sometime in the next 90 days. Miss a week and you will feel it in your commission check. Miss the entire month and you will tank your pipeline, fall into a slump, and wake up 90 days later desperate, feeling like a loser, with no clue how you ended up there. The Law of Replacement Rick sat in in front of his VP of sales. He had made big promises at the beginning of the month on his forecast—predicting a record The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get 29
month. Now he was apologizing for a huge miss. He tried to explain how the sales they were counting on failed to materialize for one reason or another. In a desperate Hail Mary, he pointed out that in the two previous months of the quarter his team had delivered ahead of the forecast. His excuses fell on deaf ears. Rick came to me looking for answers. “My team let me down, and I can’t let that happen again. The one thing my VP expects is that we make the forecast. How do I keep my team from quitting on me in the future?” I asked Rick to walk me through his team’s activity over the past few months since he had taken over as sales manager. He explained that when he first started working with the team, the pipe was weak. He’d pushed his team hard to prospect and get it filled with opportunities. “And it worked!” he said emphatically. “Two months ago we had the best month we’ve had in two years. The next month was even better. That’s why I don’t understand what happened this month. It’s like everybody just gave up.” “Rick, were your salespeople prospecting at the same intensity during those two big months as they did when you were pushing them to fill the pipeline?” I asked. “No, once we got the pipe full of opportunities, we got out there and started closing deals.” “Okay, so what does your pipeline look like for next month?” “Well,thatisanother thingIhadtoexplaintomy VP.We’ve been so busy working on closing deals that we’ve let it get weak again.” Problem identified. I had to break the news to Rick that his salespeople had not given up on him. Instead he had allowed his team to jump on the classic sales roller coaster because he had failed to heed the Law of Replacement. Here’s a math question: Becky has 30 prospects in her pipeline. Her closing percentage is 10 percent. She closes one deal. How many prospects remain in her pipe? 30 Fanatical Prospecting
Most people answer 29. The real answer is 20. So why 20? Here’s the math. Becky has a 1 in 10 probability of closing a deal. That means on average she will close only one deal out of 10 prospects she puts in her pipeline. The net result is when she closes one deal, the other nine are no longer viable prospects. This means her pipeline will be reduced by 10 prospects rather than one. She must now replace those 10 prospects to keep her pipeline full. The Law of Replacement can be a difficult concept to under- stand because it is a statistical formula. You may in fact argue how we could possibly know that the other nine prospects are no longer closeable. To do, however, is missing the point. We are talking about statistical probabilities based on Becky’s average closing ratio. The stats tell us, over the long run, that she must replace those prospects to keep her pipeline healthy and full. The Law of Replacement is a critical concept to internalize because failure to heed this law is the reason salespeople get on, and stay on, roller coasters. Up and down. Up and down. Until one day they get so far down that they can’t get back up again. 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. The Anatomy of a Sales Slump Ninety-nine percent of sales slumps can be linked directly to a failure to prospect. The anatomy of a sales slump looks something like this: ■ At some point you stopped prospecting (see the 30-Day Rule). ■ Because you stopped prospecting, your pipeline stalls (see the Law of Replacement). The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get 31
■ Because the prospects in your pipe are dead, you stop closing deals. ■ As you experience this failure, there is an erosion of your confidence. ■ Your crumbling confidence creates negative self-talk and that further degrades your confidence, wrecks your enthusiasm, and causes you to feel like a loser. ■ Feeling like a loser saps your energy and motivation for prospecting activity. ■ Because you don’t feel like prospecting, you call the same old dead-end prospects over and over and get nowhere. ■ The lack of prospecting activity makes your already stale pipe even worse. ■ You start hoping for silver bullets. But, because hope is not a strategy, nothing changes. ■ You sink deeper into your slump, get desperate, and then bam! You get slapped by the Universal Law of Need. ■ Your sales days become depressing black holes of misery. Early in my sales career I hit a bad slump. The previous quarter I’d closed a ton of new business and allowed myself to get caught up in the administrative work required to set up those new customers. The truth is, I took the easy way out and justified my lack of prospecting with the admin work. Ninety days later I woke up to a new quarter and a sales manager in my face demanding that I get my sales back on track. It was my up-front and close experience with the brutal reality that in sales it is not about what you have sold but rather what you have sold today. My sales manager pulled me aside and explained the 30-Day Rule to me. He pointed out that I was in a precarious situation. My bone-dry pipeline was testament to this sad state of affairs. He gave me one strong piece of advice: “Go get on the phone and start dialing.” Truthfully, I was depressed, angry, and full of excuses. I felt like a total loser. But I took his advice and started prospecting. Just taking action to save my hide boosted my spirits. 32 Fanatical Prospecting
At first, though, it didn’t feel like I was making any progress— when you are desperate, you try to will the world to conform to your unreasonable deadlines. I felt that I was just going through the motions and sinking deeper into quicksand because I wasn’t actually selling anything. But each day of calling added opportunities to my pipe. I stuck with it and by the end of the quarter, miraculously, I was the number-one sales rep in my region. The impact of daily prospecting on my performance that quarter—from zero to hero in just three months—made an indelible impression on me. It was a lesson I never had to learn again. Sooner or later, we all let down our guard and find ourselves in desperate need of a sale. The cumulative impact of our poor decisions, procrastination, fears, lack of focus, and even laziness have added up and suddenly we are desperately scrambling to survive. You can recover, but first you must acknowledge where the blame for your predicament lies. You see, often, when we find ourselves in desperate situations, we fall back on human nature and blame everything and everyone for our plight except, of course, ourselves. The Universal Law of Need doesn’t punish others, though. It punishes you for your failures in executing the daily disciplines required for success. Once you look in the mirror and accept your own culpability and take responsibility, you have a chance to change your future. The First Rule of Sales Slumps The first rule of holes is when you are in one, stop digging, and the first rule of sales slumps is when you are in one, start prospecting. The only real way to get out of a sales slump is to get back up to the plate and start swinging. When you find yourself in a slump, take a breath, acknowledge that your negative emotions are just making things worse, and The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get 33
commit yourself to daily prospecting. Do whatever it takes to get your mind focused on prospecting and committing to daily goals. Don’t spend a moment in thought about what might happen to you if you don’t get what you need. Worry won’t change the future. Likewise, don’t get mired down in regret over what you have failed to do. Your future does not lie in your past. Instead, put all of your energy, emotion, and effort into actions that you control. Success in sales is a simple equation of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual activity. In other words, you are in complete control of your future. Even in a desperate situation, if you go back to the basics and focus on the right activity soon, the results will come. It will usually take about 30 days of dedicated daily activity to get back on track. One of my absolute favorite quotes is from Arnold Palmer: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” There is a parallel singularity in sales: The more you prospect, the luckier you get. Will training, experience, and technique make you a better prospector? Of course. However, it is far more important that you prospect consistentlythan thatyou prospect using the besttechniques. When you prospect consistently—and that means every day— amazing things happen. The cumulative impact of daily prospecting is massive. You begin to connect with the right people, in the right accounts, at just the right time. Suddenly, opportunities drop in your lap out of nowhere (my team at Sales Gravy calls this phenomenon “The Sales Gods”). Most salespeople never get lucky because they only do the minimal amount of prospecting required to just squeak by, and when they do start prospecting (usually out of desperation), they expect instant miracles. When those miracles don’t happen, they gripe that prospecting doesn’t work and crawl back into the warm comfort of mediocrity. You can’t expect to make prospecting calls for a single day and expect miracles any more than you could expect to hit the 34 Fanatical Prospecting
driving range once and go on to win a golf tournament. It requires consistent commitment and discipline over time—a little bit every day. So go hit the phones, knock on doors, send e-mails and text messages, pound LinkedIn, ask for referrals, attend networking events, and talk to strangers. Be fanatical. Don’t let anything or anyone stop you. The more you prospect, the luckier you get. The More You Prospect, the Luckier You Get 35