Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling (Jeb Blount)

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.

Thirsty for knowledge: Fanatical prospectors welcome feedback and coaching. They seek out every opportunity to learn and invest in themselves by voraciously consuming books, podcasts, audiobooks, blog posts, online training, live seminars, and anything else they believe will make them better. They have an unshakable belief that everything happens f

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 increase

Systematic and efficient: Fanatical prospectors have the ability to execute with near-robotic and systematical efficiency. They are skilled at their craft like a pro athlete. They protect the golden hours, block their time, and concentrate their power to tune out distractions and avoid disruptions. They systematically develop their prospect databas

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

If you work for a small company or a start-up, you'll need to balance your prospecting to both build your database with long-term opportunities and fill the pipe with deals you can close now.

Confident: Fanatical prospectors approach prospecting with confidence. They expect to win and believe they are going to win. They have developed mental toughness and the ability to manage the disruptive emotions of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They leverage confidence and self-control to persuade prospects to give up time and resources to engage i

Balance simply means that to get the best return from your prospecting time investment, there should be a mixture of telephone, in-person, e-mail, social selling, text messaging, referrals, networking, inbound leads, trade shows, and cold calling. The relative distribution of your time investment in each prospecting methodology should be based on y

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.