When I'm working with salespeople who are being held back by all or one of the 3Ps, I get them focused on making just one call. Then the next. Then the next. One call at a time. (Location 1120)
Just pick up the phone and make the call. Let the “what ifs” take care of themselves. I know that might sound a bit harsh, but a push is sometimes what is required to break this destructive cycle. It's not much different from how I learned to swim. (Location 1124)
The CEO mindset is the most critical component of time, territory, and resource management. (Location 1194)
CEOs are ultimately responsible for the results of their organization. (Location 1199)
Likewise, in sales, you are constrained by scare resources. Your job is to generate the highest ROI possible for your company and the largest possible commission outcome for yourself with those scarce resources. And your scarcest resource is time. (Location 1202)
The single biggest challenge for salespeople is keeping nonrevenue-generating activities from interfering with the Golden Hours. (Location 1215)
Salespeople get paid to sell. Period. End of story. (Location 1223)
Do important nonsales activities before or after the Golden Hours. (Location 1242)
Delegating is how you scale yourself. It is how you get more done with the same 24 hours. However, delegating also requires you to have to let go of control and trust other people. (Location 1262)
Effective delegation begins with effective communication. Salespeople create havoc and communication breakdowns when they fail to give clear instructions to their support team. (Location 1267)
Your support staff cannot read your mind. When you take time, in advance, to develop a plan, articulate clear instructions, make sure everyone knows where they are going and have a map to get there, you'll find that you add hours back to your sales week. (Location 1270)
Follow up, follow up, follow up. Once you have delegated a task to your support team, you must provide consistent and ongoing communication and follow up. (Location 1273)
Parkinson's Law states that work tends to expand to fill the time allotted for it. Horstman's Corollary is the converse. (Location 1310)
Salespeople and leaders are absolutely stunned at how much they get done when they block their time, focus on a single activity, and set an outcome goal for that activity. (Location 1314)
We schedule our prospecting blocks into three “Power Hours” that are spread across the day—morning, midday, and afternoon. (Location 1322)
If you invest just an hour a day to make 25 to 50 teleprospecting calls and another hour for e-mail and social prospecting, I can absolutely and unequivocally guarantee that in less than 60 days, your pipeline will be packed. (Location 1334)
Prospecting blocks should be scheduled or “blocked” on your calendar like any other commitment. (Location 1343)
The key to making prospecting blocks work is to treat them as sacred—in the same manner you view a set meeting with a customer, prospect, your boss, or an important event with your family. (Location 1344)
What makes prospecting blocks so productive is the concentration of all of your power on a single focus. (Location 1353)
Basic neuroscience refutes the delusional human belief that we are good at multitasking. Our brains don't actually multitask. (Location 1359)
Laura abandoned the prospecting call she was about to make, looked down, and reached for her phone. (Location 1393)
During the two hours I observed her, she'd lost her focus more than 11 times. (Location 1397)
When her two-hour prospecting block ended, she'd achieved just a fraction of her activity target. Then (I can't make this stuff up) she turned to me and said, “See, these call targets they give us are ridiculously unreasonable. There is no way anybody can possibly make that many calls.” (Location 1399)
The two biggest prospecting derailers for sales professionals are e-mail and mobile devices (text, social media, e-mail, web surfing, apps). (Location 1402)
This means that during prospecting blocks or building proposal blocks or follow-up call blocks or whatever block you are in, you need to turn everything else off. Schedule alternate time blocks for dealing with e-mail, watching cat videos, or hanging out on Facebook. (Location 1411)
Most salespeople have a really hard time getting started with prospecting each morning. There are dozens of convenient distractions. Iannarino says that one of the best ways to “avoid these distractions is to never check your e-mail first thing in the morning.” (Location 1419)
E-mail is the great time-sucker of the twenty-first century. It is an always-on stream of consciousness. (Location 1421)
E-mail is the derailer of all derailers. The time-sucker of all time-suckers. If you are itching for a few unproductive hours that you will never get back, just open up e-mail and dive in. (Location 1423)
Blocking out the first one to two hours of each day for a focused telephone prospecting block is the mark of fanatical prospectors. (Location 1446)
This is one of my favorite whines from salespeople who are unwilling to face the truth about e-mail. Of course, some e-mails are going to be important. But important does not mean urgent. (Location 1450)
When I was in my twenties, I worked for an entrepreneur. The man was worth millions and ran several successful companies. He was also a hands-on leader who for some reason took an interest in me. (Location 1470)
He went on to explain that most people don't take the time to calculate their worth, and because they don't understand what they are worth, they spend their time on activities that are far below their pay grade, and this holds them back. (Location 1510)
Understanding what you are worth helps you gain awareness of the cost of focusing on trivial things. (Location 1518)
do. Just take your annual income goal and divide it by the total number of Golden Hours in each year and you'll find what you are worth per hour. (Annual Income Goal)/(Number of Working Weeks × Golden Hours) = What You Are Worth an Hour (Location 1519)
The bottom line is you've got roughly eight Golden Hours each day to sell and make a living, and you have a choice. (Location 1526)
Prospecting, in many ways, is a brutal contact sport that shuns the nuance, art, and finesse of moving a deal through the sales pipe. (Location 1578)
Prospecting is not for building relationships, selling, or chatting up your buyer. It is for setting the appointment, qualifying, building familiarity, and when it makes sense, moving into the sales process right on the spot. (Location 1580)
The most valuable activity in the sales process is a set appointment—no matter where you are in the pipe: initial meeting, discovery meetings, presentations, closing meetings, and so on. (Location 1587)
Here's the truth about the CRM: If you don't own it, you will never reach your true earning potential. Owning it means applying the CEO mindset we discussed earlier. It means: (Location 1886)
Fanatical prospectors own their database. They own it because they get it. Their database is where targeted lists come from. Their database makes them more efficient and effective. It should be so important to you that you eat, sleep, and drink it. (Location 1893)
When we finally started to dig into what was going on, we discovered that he had only logged into the CRM once the entire time he worked for us. Sad but true, and by then it was too late. We fired him. (Location 1896)
More often than not, salespeople treat their database like a trash can rather than a gold mine. Call notes aren't inputted. Records aren't kept up to date. Calls are not logged. (Location 1906)
Put every detail about every account and every interaction with every account and contact in your CRM. Make good, clear notes. Never procrastinate. (Location 1917)
Shocking? Not really. I ask this question to groups of salespeople regularly. The response is always the same. I'm not going to waste your time discussing why salespeople don't ask because that answer is more than obvious: (Location 1986)
Familiarity is also built through personal branding—making a direct investment in improving the awareness of your name, expertise, and reputation. (Location 2036)
There is, however, a personal branding methodology that is so little used, I consider it a secret weapon in the war for familiarity. It has an extraordinary track record for producing results and creates instant familiarity, credibility, and leads. (Location 2042)
Solution: Use action words and directive statements instead of questions. List-based subject lines that include a testimonial like “3 Reasons Why ABC Chose Us” are especially powerful, as are referral subject lines like “Jeb Blount Said We Should Talk” and statement-based subject lines like “Biggest Fail in Industrial Pumps.” (Location 4089)
Solution: Connect your subject line to an issue your prospect is facing—especially if it is emotional or stressful—or compliment them on a recent accomplishment or something that you know makes them feel proud. For (Location 4097)