Predictable Prospecting
High-Profit Prospecting
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Episode Highlights:
- Mark’s motivation behind writing High-Profit Prospecting
- Different prospecting processes for different personas
- Chasing an outcome
- The worst strategy for prospecting
- Top three strategies from High- Profit Prospecting
- Cycling your sales calls
Resources:
- Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler
- High Profit Prospecting by Mark Hunter
- Visit Mark Hunter at The Sales Hunter to book him for speaking engagements and read his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Hey everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, we have Mr. Mark Hunter, also known as the Sales Hunter. I’ve asked him on the show because his book, High Profit Prospecting, is one that needs to belong on your bookshelves or in your Kindle or however you consume information. This book is really well written and has a lot of great tips in it. I’ve asked Mark to come on the show today so that he can tell us about the why behind writing his book, who the audience that he serves, and also get an idea of the work that he has done out of the field with companies around the world and organizations here locally. Welcome, Mark. Mark: Thank you for having me on today. You know what, my book needs to be on your bookshelf on the Kindle adjacent to that Predictable Prospecting book that somebody by the name Marylou Tyler wrote. Marylou: Yes. That book just launched in August, thank you for referencing it. Tell me about High Profit Prospecting. What got you motivated? Because you know, writing a book is not a trivial task, what was the drive behind getting this book out? Mark: I clearly had a short circuit in my brain. Like you said, to write a book is absolutely insane. You know what, I wrote the book really because a few years ago, I wrote a book, High Profit Selling, and it was about how to close a deal without a discount. One of the things that I continuously found, I’m sure you have found this too, that if you don’t prospect right, you can’t close right. What I found is that people were having to discount deals to get them to close because they were prospecting the wrong prospect. What I want to do is I want to write a book that says, “Let’s go up string, let’s go to the source, let’s really change the discussion and let’s get the right prospect.” One of the examples I love to share is that, too many organizations and it’s whether it be outbound focused or inbound focused. In particular, what I see right now is inbound because the challenge to getting good inbound leads is difficult. What I find happening is that too many people wind up with leads that are really representing people that just have a heartbeat. If they responded to something, they just said, “Hi,” they just respond or something, they think they’re a lead. “See if they have a heartbeat,” my dog has got a heartbeat. My dog is never going to buy anything from me. I think this is the challenge, we have to be more discerning in how we prospect. We’ve got to target who is the prospect we’re going after, who is that perfect customer that we know? And then let’s come back up stream. That’s who we want to be focusing in on. It’s changes the discussion because it also requires many times, they have to have different prospecting processes. You’re so to speak fishing in different lakes, you might use one type of bait in one lake, you might use another type of bait in a different lake. You have to use different processes. And again, sometimes this is challenging for any sales person to think that they can do this. But I tell you what, when you really segment that, and you talk about it in your book too in terms of really segmenting, it’s amazing how much more effective you can be. Marylou: Indeed. We have dedicated in chapters of the book, chapter two and chapter three, all about how to identify you ideal account profiles and also what we’re calling the prospect persona. The way we do it is we say, “Look, when you’re going into and you figured out an account that’s worthy of going after, there are people within that account. Those people are influenced either directly or indirectly by other colleagues, maybe internal resources or external resources. It’s up to you to find all those people for the purpose of starting the conversation and also for moving a prospect further into the pipeline.” I love the way you said, “Look, let’s go to the source and make sure that we are looking at the accounts that are going to give us the highest revenue potential in our case for outreach, with the high probability of closing.” Mark: There’s something there on that also because too many times what we as salespeople fall into trap of is that we go because this customer looks like this, looks like this. What we’re not chasing is a look but what we’re chasing an outcome. That’s what we want to be profiling. What is the outcome that we know we can help our customers with? One of the things that I always love to share with sales teams, let’s not kid ourselves. A lot of people wake up in the morning and go, “Aaaah, I got to make another 50 calls, I got to make another 25 calls, I got to do aaah…” They freak out and I always say prospecting is absolutely the most fun part of the selling process for one very simple reason. If you believe that you can help people achieve a level of outcome that they did not think was possible, how can you not get excited about that? Your whole goal is to simplify those perfect prospects that you know you can help them achieve an outcome that they didn’t think was possible. When I talk about prospecting, it’s just like as you said in your book and I think you know, you talked about chapters two and three, I think I do with chapters three and four but it’s a segmentation in terms of how do we really isolate and then what is the strategy we’ve gotta be using to be going after that individual? As I use my book, I say, “You’re not a prospect at first. You’re a lead then you’re a suspect.” You have to be qualified, you have to earn the right to become a prospect. This is a challenge I think a lot of organizations make, they push their people out, they go, “We just want all these leads, all these leads, all these leads and all these suspects.” Well, let me tell you something. What you have is you don’t have a sales pipeline, and you have a sales parking lot because all you’re doing is parking all that stuff there. I mean, you see that client you work with all the time. This is a question I love asking sales managers, I said okay, “Let’s look at some of your people, let’s look at their funnels and when do they anticipate these deals to close?” It’s amazing how so many are going to close on the last day of their fiscal quarter or the last day of their fiscal year. Oh, give me a break. Don’t think that your customers are going to suddenly close the deal just because it’s your quarter end, your month end, no, they’re not going to do that. To me, that’s absolutely garbage. Again, that says I got to get upstream and I gotta be targeting, I gotta be focused in on who are the best leads that become the best suspects that become the best prospects. Because really what my goal is I don’t want to have a lot of prospects. In fact, my goal is really to spend more time with fewer prospects. I share that when I’m speaking. I speak 50, 75 times a year at least around the world. It’s always funny cause I love watching the audience whenever I share that. I said, “Your goal is to spend more time with fewer prospects.” There’s this like this, “Huh? What do you want me to do?” But it is because think about that. If you’ve got the right prospect, you want to spend as much time as possible with them to be able to close that Again, that comes back to that stupid strategy that too many people have. Whether we call it just spraying and praying but whatever. “We’re just going to hit people once and well, I reached out to them out a month ago, they did respond so they must not be interested.” Oh, you idiot, you idiot. I’ll just terminate you right now. Marylou: It’s interesting you mentioned the word strategies. I love that because that now leads into my next question. In the book, what are your favorite strategies from the book that you, I know there’s hundreds in the book of different things that people can pick up and try and activate right away. If you have to dwindle it down to your top three, what strategies from that book will give people the 80/20 big bang for the buck that you think they should at least go to those pages and read more about it? Mark: Let’s cut down to some real basics because you know what’s funny? The underlying solution for success in prospecting comes down to discipline and focus. If you’re disciplined and you have focus, it’s amazing how successful you’ll be. Let’s come down to three, I’m going to cut them down to very simple things. One, ”Tomorrow starts today.” Here’s the deal, too many people wait until the day to figure out who they’re going to prospect. As a result, they spend all of their time getting ready to prospect and they spend zero time actually prospecting. If you were to really to segment your time, really break it down and say how much of your time is actively engaged in prospecting. What I mean actually engaged prospecting, I mean picking up the phone, calling, or really doing a concerning job with email, to whatever messaging. By the way, LinkedIn is a great tool for sales prospecting. But #socialmedia without social connection is social stupidity. Don’t think you can just throw stuff out there. You got to have one to one connection. I got a tremendous amount of business myself through one to one conversations by way of LinkedIn. But see, it’s one to one conversations, it’s not these group things, it’s one to one. It’s not me saying, “I’m going to send out messages to Marylou Tyler and be like, “Hey, hire me for your next sales kickoff, I’ll come in and I’ll motivate them, share it all…” no, no, not at all. It’s getting engaged with them on what their needs are, getting engaged with them. Here’s the other piece, “Don’t start what you can’t finish.” What do I mean by this? Too many people, they get into this prospecting model, and I see this with organizations. It’s slow, everybody’s gotta hit the phone, everybody’s gotta hit email, everybody just gotta be prospecting. We do just enough to stir the wind a little bit, we get them business and we walk away. In fact, I give a very vivid example in my book about a company I was working with when I used to do a lot of consulting that was victim of just that. The problem is they never really see the benefits of the prospecting. What I mean by don’t start what you can’t finish is if I’m going to reach out to you once, I’m going to make sure that I can have it in my calendar, in my cadence, to be able to reach out to you five, six, seven, eight, nine times; how many ever times I feel it may take in a designated period to turn you into a prospect. Don’t think that one and done, it’s not going to be enough. The third piece that I really emphasize, “It is an integration of all of your communication platforms.” Social media is really nothing more than the telephone in a different form. Social media’s nothing more than the old face to face door knock sales call that people used to do back in the sixties or in the seventies and then there’s some industries that still do that. It’s how do I create one to one messaging across whatever platform I’m going to find effective to reach you at. By the way, the platform I think might be effective is not necessarily the one you think effective. Let me give you a quick example. I’m going to spend today sending out great prospecting emails, all these are great. I’m sitting at my laptop, I’m sitting at my desk, I’m cranking at these wonderful emails, no they look great. You know what? They look pretty dumb on a smart device. That’s exactly what’s happening because the person who’s receiving it probably received it on a smart device. That title, that subject line that you had, and that first sentence that you have, oh man that’s just pathetic. Delete, delete, delete. You talk about this a lot in your book. You’ve got to craft that email to where it’s going to resonate with the prospect when they see it on their smart device which means it’s totally the inverse of everything your high school English teacher ever taught you. My mom was one. I couldn’t get into this profession when she passed away. She used to chastise me on my business writing. I said, “Mom, this is not high school English, okay.” Think about it, it’s all about the sound bite, it’s all about that sentence bite. How do I grab that person’s attention in those three, four seconds to pull them in? Marylou: Right. For those of you who are listening to this, the three top points that Mark made, I’m going to reiterate them in some reformats so that you really take it to heart because they are the foundation for any prospecting mastery, whether it be at the sales process like I teach or the actual skills training and habit training that Mark does. The first one, “Tomorrow begins today.” Block out time, we call it block time, sometimes it’s called time blocking. Coming from the call center background that I have been fortunate to work in, the longer you’re on the phone, the better you get. A good habit to instill for Mark’s first point is to do all your preparations the night before you go home. Take the latter part of the day or time of the day you know is going to be dead in terms of conversation with your prospects, make your lists of who you’re going to contact. Then the next day, you’re ready to go and just make call after call because you will have prepared what specific information you want to share with the prospect in a one to one conversation. Number two, “Don’t start what you cannot finish.” This is that cadencing and sequencing. As Mark said, “One call is not enough.” Most people, there’s a lot of data to support this, need somewhere between six and ten touches with varying types of communication. Whether it’s email, whether it’s leaving a phone voice mail, whether it’s just doing a dial but not leaving any message, that’s a touch. Make sure that whatever you do with your prospects in terms of trying to start conversation, that you do this more than once. Think about your schedule. Typically, we work with the 22 to 32 business day cycle of touches and then we put the records to sleep. Now, this is under the sales process umbrella. Work on a cadence that works for you, that will work for your clients, and you’ll know what that is. It may be in a month, it may be in six weeks, depending on what you’re selling. The last one he said was to integrate communication platforms because at the end of the day, this is not a business to business type of selling, this is person to person selling. Did I summarize that correctly, Mark? Mark: Yeah, you did. That was your engineering background and I love it. It was fantastic because I was all over the place. You did a good job on that. You brought up a couple key points in terms of that 22 to 32 day deal. It is so critical because I will blitz, one of the things that I’m strong at. I blitz on my prospecting. Let’s say you’re the person I’m targeting. If I reach that point, and again, the point is dependent upon the sales cycle of what you’re selling, two examples I use. If I’m selling freight shipping, freight transportation as a very short selling sales cycle. I may reach out to shippers almost on an every other day basis. If however I’m selling software upgrades where those upgrades only occur every three to four years, let’s say my cadence might be once every week or so, maybe even more than that for a period two months or three months and then I backup those. What I do is I hit you and then if you don’t respond, I back off for sixty to ninety days. Then I come back, I put you back in, and I take you back out. What I’m doing is I’m cycling my probable leads to the prospects. I’m cycling them through and I’m using my time in really a more efficient manner. The example I like to use is you could be driving down the interstate and it seems like every exit, every off ramp, there’s a sign from McDonalds, McDonalds, McDonalds, McDonalds. That doesn’t mean you stop at every single McDonald’s. Somewhere along the line, you may say you need to use a restroom, you need to grab something to eat, whatever you say, you’re going to stop at McDonalds. McDonald’s doesn’t put one sign on the interstate, they put multiple signs everywhere. This is what I refer to as, when we’re prospecting, this is what we’re doing. We’re putting another billboard on the side of the road. We don’t know which one’s going to cause a reaction but we know one of them will. But if we don’t put enough of them out there, we’ll never get a chance. Think about it, somebody like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola does the same thing, Pepsi does it. These are huge. Everybody knows what they are. If these people are willing to spend this kind of money on advertising, on marketing, and we think we can make one call and cut through the noise, you’ve got to be kidding me. It’s insane. Marylou: Indeed. I think you mentioned another about cycling and this best time to call. As you’re going through your block times, start thinking about what are those best days, what are those best times? Look at your connects, look at the things that matter. Am I having meaningful conversations at certain times of the day? I did a test with a client of mine who was having a lot of call reluctance. They were just not wanting to pick up the phone because they said, “Every time we dial, we get through to voicemail or we don’t get anyone.” I said okay, let’s come in 7:30AM, I’ll bring donuts and coffee and let’s do a 7:30AM to 8:00AM call block time and see what happens.” Those five connects that I’m trying to get my folks to in a block time, we got them in thirty minutes instead of two hours. The moral of the story here is don’t be afraid to move that block time around because it’s all about your return on effort, the ROE is what I call it. We don’t want you to kill yourself making 80 dials, we want you to have meaningful conversations. As part of this, when you’re thinking about what Mark was talking about, sequencing and cadencing, is when are those best days to call people and when am I going to get more meaningful conversations? It doesn’t have to be hard, but you’ve gotta do the homework first to figure out what the schedule looks like. Do you agree with that, Mark? Mark: I totally agree. What’s funny is that there’s a lot of industries, “Oh, we can’t call on Monday mornings or we can’t call on Friday afternoons.” It’s amazing because sales people, we can’t call on Friday afternoons because, really what you’re trying to do is you’re just trying to shut down early. Yet it’s funny but a lot of people make construction trait, you call on Friday afternoon because they’re winding down, they’re getting ready to get into beer thirty. You call them and they’ll have a conversation with you. There are other industries that, “I can do a great job of calling Monday morning and scoop up all kinds of businesses.” Don’t allow yourself to think too quick ideas on the telephone, this is really creepy. Some of you are going to say, “Aaaah, I can’t do this.” You know one of the best weeks to prospect is a holiday week. I love the week of thanksgiving and the last two weeks of the year. “Mark I can’t, I gotta take time off, I gotta take vacation.” Hey, you want to eat? Bad salespeople have skinny kids, that just goes without saying. Here’s why I love prospecting the last couple weeks of the year. So many people are on vacation, so many businesses go into shut down mode. The people who are there working are like shocked, hey, whoa, you’re working? Really? It’s amazing, you won’t reach as many people but the people you do reach, the conversations you’ll have will be incredible. Guess what, if you’re in a prospecting structure where you have to make the call to get an appointment, guess what, you do that the last two weeks of December? You’ll start off the first week with appointments whereas your competitors are sitting there dialing, trying to make appointments, you’re coming out to shoot. I love that. One other thing, you’re trying to reach a high level person. We’ll see you’re trying to reach out a high level person and you just can’t reach him, you just can’t reach him. Call him 58 minutes after the hour to two minutes into the hour. Here’s a secret, most people start their meetings at the top of the hour. Guess what, a busy person, a C level person, a senior level person who’s in meetings all day, the one window of time when they might be available is going to be at the top of the hour. I’ve used this technique time and time again and it’s amazing, it’s amazing how well it works. Marylou: Wow, Mark. For everyone listening, these tips are all in his book, High Profit Prospecting, very highly recommended by the industry and his colleagues all over the world. I was just speaking with someone in Israel this morning, he’s a big Mark Hunter fan. Please, if you’re thinking about getting another book for your reading, this is one I definitely think you should download or purchase if you’re hard copy, hardcover type reader. Mark, what’s the best way for our audience to continually follow you, get a hold of you, etc.? Mark: I’m known as the Sales Hunter, and yes, Hunter is my real name. People ask me all the time, “Did you change it?” No, that’s my real name. The website is thesaleshunter.com and of course I recommend that you buy the book, High Profit Prospecting. Hey, you got to pick up that other book called Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler. Great book, great book. Marylou: Thank you. You do a lot of speaking, obviously. For those people who want to get a hold of Mark for speaking, you can still go to thesaleshunter.com. Mark: You could witness me in action, there’s about a 14 minute demo that somebody said, “Whoa, men, you’re energetic.” You’re right, I am. Marylou: This is who you are, this is wonderful. Mark: That’s right. Marylou: I very much appreciate your time on the podcast this morning. And again, for you folks, the book is High Profit Prospecting and thesaleshunter.com is Mark’s website. Thanks again Mark, I loved speaking with you. Have a great week, everybody.