High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

"One of the best Sales Lead Generation books of all time." -- BookAuthority Book Description Buyers are evolving—and so should your prospecting. As a salesperson, your pipeline is the key to your success. No matter what changes, that remains the same. Top producers prospect—and they do it ALL THE TIME. “But how?” you ask, “In the age of the Internet, isn’t cold-calling dead?” Now, in his new book, sales expert Mark Hunter shatters costly prospecting myths and eliminates confusion about what works today. Merging new strategies with proven practices, High-Profit Prospecting will help you: • Find better leads and qualify them quickly • Trade cold calling for informed calling • Tailor your timing and message • Leave a great voicemail • Craft compelling emails • Use social media effectively • Leverage referrals • Get past gatekeepers and open new doors • Steer clear of prospecting pitfalls • Connect with the C-Suite • And more The Internet won’t fill your sales funnel—and you can’t rely on the marketing department for leads (not if you want to succeed). High-Profit Prospecting puts the power back where it belongs—in your hands. Follow its formula and start bringing in valuable new business. "Capturing the attention of today’s crazy-busy buyers is tough. In High-Profit Prospecting , you’ll discover tons of highly effective ways to initiate contact and lead change-inducing conversations.” — Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling , Selling to Big Companies , and Agile Selling “Mark Hunter has an answer to the most challenging aspect of today’s sales process: making contact with the right people and the right companies. High-Profit Prospecting will super-charge your ability to control your sales destiny and walk you step by step past closed doors and through open ones you have never seen before.” — Tim Sanders, author of Dealstorming Your company just rolled out its latest innovation, and the CEO’s marching orders are clear: boost sales 25 percent over the next calendar year. You’ll have to get your new product into the hands of customers who’ve never bought from you before—and that means prospecting for new customers. You don’t hate it, but it’s not your thing. And isn’t it obsolete? With social media, you don’t have to look for customers; they’ll come to you, right? In High-Profit Prospecting , author Mark Hunter shatters six self-defeating myths about the art and science of finding customers to fill your company’s new-business pipeline. Challenging the idea that prospecting is obsolete, Hunter describes a threefold process of preparing for success, using technology to your advantage, and identifying and reaching the right people. Hunter teaches you how to: Stay motivated—the battle is won or lost in your head • Prospect without being a born salesperson • Master seven tactics for hitting your strategic targets • Identify who is a viable prospect—and who isn’t • Tailor your pitch to the customer’s needs and time-table • Use voicemail and other communication tools to your advantage • Make social media work without wasting time • Prospect large companies and C-suites Blending insights with practical advice on emails and telephone scripts, when to make phone calls, and using referrals to your advantage, this book will teach you how to hone your strategies and ask the right questions to generate success. Mark Hunter, aka “The Sales Hunter,” delivers highly sought-after training seminars and keynote addresses to companies like Salesforce, Novartis, Mattel, Lenovo, and others. He is the author of High-Profit Selling , and when he isn’t sharing his 30 years of coaching expertise with clients on five continents, he and his wife live in Omaha, Nebraska. Connect with Mark at: www.thesaleshunter.com Twitter: @TheSalesHunter Facebook: TheSalesHunter Mark Hunter, known as, "The Sales Hunter," isxa0globally recognized for his expertise in sales leadership. He specializes in business development and guiding organizations to find and retain high-quality prospects without discounting their fee.xa0His ability to inspire sales teams to create self motivating and integrity driven cultures, makes Mark Hunter a highly sought afterxa0keynote speaker,xa0consultant and coach. Mark has taken his vision for sales leadership to more than 25 countries and 5 continents where he leads and consults with companies ranging from small startups to global giants. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. High-Profit Prospecting By Mark Hunter AMACOM Copyright © 2017 Mark HunterAll rights reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8144-3776-6 Contents Foreword by Jeb Blount, ix, Introduction by Mike Weinberg, xi, PART I: BASIC TRUTHS ABOUT PROSPECTING, 1, 1. What Does Prospecting Mean Today?, 3, 2. The Myths and Surprising Facts about Finding New Customers, 11, 3. Major Factors in Successful Lead Generation, 17, PART II: PREPARING FOR PROSPECTING SUCCESS, 27, 4. Planning for High-Profit Customers, 29, 5. Fit the Prospecting Plan to Your Market, 37, PART III: TIPS, TOOLS, AND TECHNIQUES, 45, 6. Time-Management Tactics, 47, 7. Are You Prospecting or Wasting Your Time?, 53, 8. Are They Prospects or Merely Suspects?, 65, 9. Best Practices for Making the Initial Contact, 73, 10. Does the Telephone Still Work?, 79, 11. Customer Engagement Dos and Don'ts, 83, 12. Prospecting Tools — the Telephone, 89, 13. Starting the Conversation, 93, 14. Does Anybody Listen to Voicemail?, 99, 15. Email, Communication, and Connection, 109, 16. Referrals and Other Major Pipeline Builders, 125, 17. The Value and Pitfalls of Social Media, 135, 18. Prospecting via Social Media, 149, PART IV: THE TOUGH STUFF, 159, 19. Getting Past the Gatekeeper, 161, 20. Winning at the Enterprise Level, 165, 21. Is It Worth It to Even Try to Reach the C-suite?, 169, 22. Getting Past the Shut Door, 181, 23. Turning a Prospect into a Customer, 185, Conclusion: Yes, You Can Do It!, 193, Acknowledgments, 195, About the Author, 197, Index, 199, Free Sample from High-Profit Selling by Mark Hunter, 208, About AMACOM, 223, CHAPTER 1 What Does Prospecting Mean Today? "Will you help me find more prospects?" I've been asked this question more than any other since 1998, when I began my sales consulting company after spending fifteen-plus years in sales and sales management roles for several major companies. Regardless of the company size or if the person making the request is a vice president of sales for a Fortune 500 company or a solo salesperson, the number one issue is always prospecting. Sure, I receive questions about closing and negotiating, but as I probe deeper, I discover these are problems only because of poor prospecting. The only thing that has changed with regard to prospecting is how we go about it. The strategies I'm going to show you in this book are a culmination of years of working with thousands of salespeople across numerous industries in both business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C). Ten years ago, people were asking me when I was going to write a book on prospecting. My response was, "It's not time." I'm pleased to say the time is now, and what you have here are not theories or ideas, but proven strategies. Thousands of salespeople in numerous industries and countries are now using the strategies I present in this book. Ask yourself, "Would I be more successful if I had more prospects?" Your answer is "yes" — that's why you're reading this book. The reason salespeople ask me about prospecting is because for the vast majority of salespeople, prospecting doesn't work the way they expect it should. The strategies they are using fail to deliver the results they want. Compounding the problem is the fact that salespeople tend to be open to trying any new idea that pops up, even if the idea doesn't have much merit. I've seen this when solo salespeople and even entire sales teams suddenly embrace a hot idea, only to have it go cool in just a few weeks, leaving the pipeline empty. It's almost embarrassing to even be asking the question of whether you would be more successful if you had more prospects. When salespeople ask the question, my answer is always a giant "Yes!" Of course they will be more successful if they improve their prospecting strategies. Prospecting does work in today's business world. I believe more than ever that prospecting is essential because of what the Internet is doing to the selling process. False Hopes/False Promises I'm sitting near the back of a hotel ballroom full of nearly two hundred salespeople and business owners listening to "sales experts " share how they were able to build their businesses effortlessly using social media and email. These "experts" are saying nobody answers the phone, and if you want to be successful in sales, you have to live and breathe social media and the Internet. Each expert lays out a plan for the audience built around creating a massive presence using social media sites, and email. "Customers will be flocking to you," the experts contend. Every speaker seems to repeat at least ten times an hour the phrase "cold calling is dead," and each time it's said from the stage, the audience nods in approval. The more these "sales experts" talk, the more I see how the audience is becoming mesmerized by what they are saying and even more so by the processes they use. It just seems so easy to do. If you simply buy the programs they're selling and follow each step, you too will quickly have all the prospects you can handle. Not only will you have the prospects you need, but those prospects also will become customers who will buy from you time and time again. With each passing hour, the audience is becoming more and more fixated on the strategies they're hearing from each speaker. The reason the audience is soaking this all in is because they are tired of being rejected, having phone calls ignored, and not being able to generate good prospects. The final session of the day is a panel discussion with all of the presenters. I'm sitting watching the presenters answer each question, and I admit they're handling each one quite well, until someone asks if what they're doing is really nothing more than cold calling using email instead of the phone. I couldn't help but laugh, because the "experts" who proclaimed cold calling as being dead were still doing it. In fact, they had taken cold calling and supercharged it with the number of email blasts they were sending out. The biggest problem with meetings and discussions like the one above is they are far too common. Rarely does a week go by that I don't receive a phone call or an email from a salesperson struggling to make a number, and they are frustrated because they've been spending hours on a wide number of social media sites. When I ask them how many calls or contacts they've made in the last several months, the answer commonly is, "I shouldn't have to, because I'm doing so much on social media sites." Prospecting is as relevant and necessary today as it has ever been. Allowing yourself to believe you can build a huge business without having to prospect is simply crazy. The only thing that has changed is how we prospect, and that's my intent with this book — to show you how to prospect. To understand what prospecting is, let me share with you how I define the activity of prospecting: Prospecting is an activity performed by sales and/or marketing departments to identify and qualify potential buyers. It's Not Rocket Science Prospecting is not a complex process. Think about that definition, and you will see it simply means finding people who can and will buy from you. The problem is too many salespeople believe that because the Internet has changed everything with regard to how people communicate, then to be effective they need to embrace the Internet. I'm all in favor of embracing the Internet, and many of the strategies shared in the book are built around leveraging its power. Even so, you cannot rely on the Internet alone. Despite how big and powerful we may believe the Internet is, it would be foolish to believe that customers will want to buy from us without any prospecting effort on our part. Prospecting is an activity every salesperson must embrace using a well-planned strategy. Sure, there are plenty of great advertising campaigns, new product releases, and raving fans who can create a lot of customers, but rarely is that sustainable long-term, especially for salespeople and companies working in the B2B sector. Before you pass me off as somebody who is against anything the Internet and social media can do, hear me out. I'm a firm believer in leveraging every tool possible. Throughout this book, I'll share examples of how social media sites can help you prospect more effectively. Yes, social media sites can help you, but they won't do it all for you. What you will see is the impact the Internet can have regardless of whether you have a complex selling process or a short sales cycle. When Management Is Wrong, But Thinks It's Right While walking through John Wayne Airport one morning on my way to catch a flight, I heard someone calling out my name. I turned to see the president of a Chicago-based services company. His company sells primarily to large corporations and typically with multi-year contracts. Our paths had crossed at past industry conferences where I had spoken. The president grabbed me, said we needed to talk, and asked when he could arrange a conference call or meeting to discuss his problem. His problem was the same one I've heard from numerous other CEOs and VPs of sales. All the money they had been spending on marketing was simply not working as well as the board and the investment companies that owned the company expected. The company had grown dramatically, and along the way, it had developed a great reputation in its industry. The problem was the industry was now stagnant. As a result, so were sales, and the investment firms were restless. The company president knew it was only time before the board began challenging him. He went on to say how he no longer had faith in his VP of sales. I challenged him as to why, and his comment was again something I've heard from numerous others — he said his VP of sales had for several years touted how good the sales force was and how they had nothing but superstars. Truth be told, what he had weren't superstars, but merely salespeople who did a great job of responding to high-potential leads because their industry had been so hot. During a period of solid growth, the sales team simply walked away from prospecting. They didn't feel it was necessary, because the phone kept ringing. Making matters worse, the marketing department believed all of the success the sales team was having was due to the marketing department's great marketing efforts. When business began to soften, the task was given to marketing to simply increase spending, which would lead to the return of business. After two years of increased spending by marketing, the business didn't return, because it went instead to their competitor. You see, even when times were good their competitor remained aggressive with prospecting efforts. The competitor could have taken the easy way out and stopped prospecting when times were good. In fact, they probably could have reduced head count and saved money, but they knew prospecting works and is a critical process in both the good times and bad times. The Evolution of Prospecting Twenty-five years ago, when I was selling in the Minneapolis market, it never took me more than one or two calls or visits to move a person from being just a lead to being a new account. When I opened my consulting company eighteen years ago, it still didn't take more than three or four telephone calls to find a prospect and ultimately land a client. Today, most salespeople would say they have zero success finding prospects using only the telephone, and it takes any number of different means to find a lead, turn them into a viable prospect, and ultimately get them to buy. The decline of the telephone and the emergence of email and other communication tools did not cause the evolution of prospecting. Rather, what caused it to change is a shift in knowledge. When I was prospecting twenty-five years ago, I had all the knowledge about my product — if the customer wanted to know anything, they needed me. The number of options the customer could choose from was limited to what I had to offer. Today the customer has the knowledge, and along with the knowledge comes the ability to choose from any number of options and companies. The customer now has the ability to ignore you, the salesperson, because they feel you're not needed and will only waste their time. The customer feels if and when they're ready to buy, they often can make the purchase online without ever contacting a salesperson. The evolution of prospecting is not due to the number of communication methods available, but rather to the shift in who has the knowledge. When we begin to look at how we prospect in this light, we begin to realize why prospecting is such a big problem. Salespeople and companies typically go down one of two paths when it comes to prospecting. One path is sticking with the traditional methods of prospecting centered around the telephone, email, and maybe in-person visits. The other path is by jumping into the deep end of the social media pool and putting all of their resources into generating an online presence to attract leads. Neither of those paths is truly successful on its own — you need to travel down both. The customer has access to more knowledge, so the only way to counterbalance that is by convincing the customer to have confidence in you. The greater the level of confidence the customer has in you, the greater the probability for you to make a sale. Confidence is not something that's built after the customer has decided to buy; no, confidence is something that you must establish if the lead is going to become a prospect. A prospect who does not have confidence in you is not a prospect. I'll argue they're barely a contact! Sales Is Not a Science, It's an Art I've laid out each chapter in this book to challenge what you're currently doing and push you into new territory. In the early chapters, I will compel you to look at your existing process and, more importantly, to think about whom your perfect customer is. A mistake far too many salespeople make is failing to identify characteristics of their perfect customers and then work backward to determine their perfect prospects. I also don't think you can copy each strategy shared and achieve superior results. Sales involves too many variables. If sales were a science, then it would be much easier for salespeople to be successful. All they would need to do is follow the process perfectly. But I say sales is an art, and that's why so many people struggle to be successful and is especially why so many salespeople struggle with prospecting. They have an attitude about prospecting that they will only do what is necessary to make their numbers and nothing more. An attitude like that will ensure only one thing — one day you will wake up and see no sales and no pipeline. CHAPTER 2 The Myths and Surprising Facts about Finding New Customers Prospecting is not the mystery many people make it out to be. One time the owner of a company asked me to meet with Dennis, who ran the field sales office in Michigan. The owner shared with me that she was concerned all the business the Michigan sales office generated was from only three customers. I sat down with Dennis in his office to discuss the situation, and though he was aware of the problem, he admitted he was absolutely baffled as to how to correct it. The company operated in a dynamic industry where there were plenty of opportunities. His sales team consisted of four inside salespeople whose sole job was to take care of existing customers and prospect for more customers. Clearly, the job was not confusing at all. All four were knowledgeable about their business and their industry. After some conversation with the four salespeople, I discovered none of them were trying to find new customers. When I asked why, each one had an excuse. One claimed they didn't know who to call; another claimed they had never been trained; another claimed they didn't have time; and the last one told me they were just plain scared. I'll give the last one credit for being honest. The other three salespeople were simply making excuses. The problem wasn't limited to the salespeople, because Dennis, the manager, also made excuses as to why he couldn't make prospecting calls. The office was locked into a belief that prospecting was beyond what they could do. Dennis and his team allowed their fear of prospecting and/or disinterest in prospecting to go unchecked, and as a result, they did as little prospecting as possible. You might think, "How could a sales team like this exist to begin with?" Good question. Yes, it is unusual to have an entire sales team apparently paralyzed and not doing any prospecting. Typically in most organizations, there are at least a few people who will prospect. When salespeople or sales teams run from prospecting, they tend to embrace one or more of what I see are the six great myths of prospecting. A common, yet unrealistic, belief fueling all of the myths is that at some point, new customers will magically appear and there's no reason to actually go pursue new customers. Read the myths that follow, and see if any resonate with you and inform you as to why you have struggled with prospecting. PROSPECTING MYTH #1: One and Done One and done — or as some call it, "spraying and praying" — is where the salesperson merely makes a bunch of calls that all wind up in voicemail or sends out a ton of emails. In both cases, the salesperson then sits back and waits for the phone to ring and orders to come in. Of course nothing happens, and all of the effort that went into making the one round of phone calls winds up being wasted. The second act of this myth is when the salesperson begins to complain to whoever will listen about how prospecting simply does not work. After telling enough people, the salesperson begins to believe what they've been saying and soon the myth becomes real. To Dennis and his sales team, the myth that prospecting doesn't work was real because they had allowed themselves to believe it. The outcome with Dennis and his team was just as you might imagine — they lost their biggest account, and within sixty days, all of them were out of work. PROSPECTING MYTH #2: I'll Prospect When I'm Done Taking Care of My existing Customers Salespeople with established accounts hold this myth in high regard. These salespeople know they should be prospecting, but to them prospecting is clearly way down on the list of priorities. Their top objective is ensuring they properly take care of their existing accounts. The truth is the accounts are their top priority because they don't want to have to prospect. They likely view prospecting as something only the new salespeople need to do. To help everything look good, they will even go as far as to tell others that they would love to prospect, but the demands of serving their existing accounts simply doesn't allow any time for prospecting. (Continues...) Excerpted from High-Profit Prospecting by Mark Hunter . Copyright © 2017 Mark Hunter. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. Read more