What’s holding you back from making those crucial prospecting calls? How can you transform your hesitation into successful customer connections?
In Fanatical Prospecting, Jeb Blount reveals proven sales prospecting strategies that help salespeople overcome their fears and maximize their success. From managing time effectively to building strong customer relationships, these techniques can revolutionize your approach to finding new clients.
Keep reading to discover prospecting strategies that will boost your confidence and fill your pipeline with potential customers.
Sales Prospecting Strategies
We’ll explore some of Blount’s more general sales prospecting strategies. In particular, we’ll see how to overcome your hesitations about prospecting, maximize your time when prospecting, and build name recognition with your prospects.
Prospecting Strategy #1: Overcome Your Hesitations
Although prospecting is essential for succeeding in sales, many salespeople struggle to even pick up the phone to make a prospecting call. Blount contends that these salespeople suffer from over-analyzing each prospect, causing them to delay action and prospect inefficiently.
According to Blount, many salespeople believe that their prospecting strategies must be foolproof before they pick up the phone. In turn, these salespeople assess their prospects constantly to come up with a game plan—they review prospects’ LinkedIn accounts, their age, their geographic location, and so on. Further, they try to develop a perfect game plan for prospecting calls that anticipates every “What if?” that a prospect might ask.
(Shortform note: For salespeople whose perfectionism holds them back when prospecting, sales experts offer several tips for mitigating that perfectionism. For example, they recommend adopting a forgiving attitude toward yourself when you make sales mistakes, and limiting your perfectionism to high-stakes circumstances, such as making sure you spell and pronounce a prospect’s name correctly.)
But perfectionism leads salespeople to either perpetually delay their prospecting calls or make calls at an inefficient clip. After all, it takes a significant time investment to analyze each prospect and develop a plan for the prospecting call—time that could instead be spent calling additional prospects. The upshot, Blount maintains, is that these salespeople fail to fill their pipelines of potential customers, harming their own bottom line.
(Shortform note: While over-analysis can lead to inefficient prospecting, salespeople warn that many other prospecting mistakes can lead to inefficiency. For instance, many salespeople spend far too much time trying to close prospects who aren’t yet ready to buy, wasting valuable time that could be spent on other prospects. Moreover, other salespeople try to respond to every objection leveled by their prospects, causing them to lose time.)
To overcome these hesitations, Blount recommends a simple course of action: Force yourself to make prospecting calls without preparing ahead of time. While this strategy will doubtless be uncomfortable at first, Blount suggests that it’s the best route for becoming comfortable with the uncertainty of prospecting.
(Shortform note: Contrary to Blount’s recommendations to simply force yourself to make prospecting calls that you’re not comfortable with, other experts recommend exposure therapy to approach activities that you fear. When practicing exposure therapy, you’re gradually exposed to incrementally larger doses of your fear. In the case of prospecting, that might mean starting with close friends or family members who are willing to role play as prospects, then making calls to warm leads before actually making cold prospecting calls.)
Prospecting Strategy #2: Maximize Your Time
Once you’ve gotten past your fears about prospecting, Blount says the next step is to maximize your time. Specifically, he recommends that you block off windows of time during your prospecting golden hours to reach your goal number of calls.
First, Blount explains that according to Parkinson’s Law, our work often fills whatever time we allocate to it. For example, if you gave yourself one hour to send 10 emails, it’s likely that the 10 emails would take up nearly all of the hour. But he points out that the inverse is also true: If we allocate less time to a work project, we’ll likely be able to finish it in that shorter window. For instance, if you only gave yourself 20 minutes to send 10 emails, you’d probably force yourself to finish them in those 20 minutes.
For this reason, Blount recommends that you allocate a relatively short window of time each day—perhaps an hour or two—to make your prospecting calls. In so doing, you’ll find yourself far more efficient at making (say) 60 calls per day, because the shorter timeframe will compel you to call efficiently.
(Shortform note: Experts recommend additional ways that you can use Parkinson’s Law to increase your productivity. For instance, you can break larger projects into smaller individual tasks, and then use Parkinson’s Law to efficiently knock out every individual task. Additionally, they point out that Parkinson’s Law is less effective whenever your working environment is full of distractions, so fully harnessing Parkinson’s Law requires eliminating distractions.)
As for when to schedule this window, Blount advises scheduling it during the golden hours—the hours when customers are most likely to answer your calls, which are typically during the workday but outside of their lunch breaks. Because customers will likely be at home outside of this window, they’ll be less keen on taking business calls, meaning that the golden hours provide the best opportunity for prospecting successfully.
(Shortform note: Although Blount doesn’t explicitly list the times that quantify “golden hours,” other sales experts report that these hours are roughly from 10 a.m. to noon and from 4 to 6 p.m. According to studies, prospects are more likely to answer the phone and be receptive to salespeople in these windows.)
Prospecting Strategy #3: Build Name Recognition With Your Prospects
Although maximizing your time is essential to prospecting success, Blount clarifies that even the most efficient prospectors will struggle if they haven’t first built name recognition with their prospects. After all, potential customers are more likely to respond positively to your prospecting attempts—whether by phone, email, or in person—if they’re aware of you and your company. To that end, Blount recommends several techniques for building this recognition: Prospect relentlessly, leverage referrals from existing customers, and network constantly.
Technique #1: Prospect Relentlessly
Blount points out that one straightforward way to build awareness with potential customers is to contact them via multiple prospecting channels. For example, engaging with them on social media, leaving voicemails, and shooting them an email will all increase their awareness of you and your company. Eventually, this increased awareness will pay dividends as it makes prospects more likely to become customers.
(Shortform note: Although consistent prospecting can help build awareness with customers, other sales experts warn that it can also annoy prospects and make them less likely to respond positively to you. For this reason, you should space out your contact attempts rather than spamming prospects several days in a row.)
Technique #2: Leverage Referrals
In addition to reaching out to prospects via multiple channels, Blount also encourages salespeople to lean heavily on referrals from satisfied customers. He explains that, when a satisfied customer who knows some of your prospects gives you a referral, you instantly become more trustworthy in those prospects’ eyes. For example, if you sold a software program to Bob, a manager at a local electronics store, and wanted to sell the same product to Bob’s friend, Kim, it’s much more likely that Kim would engage with you if Bob vouched for you and your product.
(Shortform note: To leverage referrals effectively, other salespeople recommend that you start by asking clients with whom you have the strongest relationships. These clients are often those with whom you’ve had the longest relationship and frequently communicate with, rather than those whom you’ve only sold to once in the recent past.)
Technique #3: Network Constantly
Finally, Blount suggests that you attend networking events as frequently as possible, as these allow you to meet prospects in person and gain recognition. To find these networking events—for example, conferences and talks—simply reach out to your local chambers of commerce, which are organizations that bring together business professionals in your community.
(Shortform note: Experts offer several tips for making strong connections at networking events. For example, they recommend trying to get to know other people at the event by asking questions that show you’re interested in them as people, not just as potential sales. For instance, you might ask what they most enjoy about their job. Additionally, they point out that the best places to network are heavily trafficked areas, such as near the bar or food areas.)
