Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount
If A Realtor Closing 200+ Transactions at $40,000,000 Plus in Sales Tells You What She’s Reading, Would You Read the Book?
That was the question facing me when Christina Welch shard with me that she was reading “Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text and Cold Calling”.
I wolfed down the pizza we were eating, and then stopped by my office on the way home to place my Amazon order. Sometimes two-day delivery is too slow!
Fanatical Prospecting was written by Jeb Blount. He is described as a “Sales Acceleration Specialist”. I’d never heard that term and had no real idea what a sales acceleration specialist was. If you’re like me, you’ve got to figure that it’s something real good!
A bit about Blout. John Blount grew up in Tyler, Texas where his excellence as a quarterback earned him a scholarship to Tulsa University. His success at Tulsa resulted in him being selected in the second round of the NFL draft by the Oakland Raiders before heading to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the mid-seventies where he remained, mostly on the bench until 1977.
Not many of us grow up with a desire to be sales people. When the light comes on that success in sales has near boundless financial rewards, suddenly sales seems worthy of study. And study sales Jeb did do!
His success in sales led Jeb to a career in sales team development, sales training and as an author of 8 books on sales and CEO of Sales Gravy. You can learn more about his work their at www.SalesGravy.com
He also has published more than 100 articles on sales and customer service, publishes a newsletter that reaches more than 225,000 subscribers and his podcast has been downloaded on iTunes more hat 8 million times.
Enough about Blount, back to the book!
The book is a fast easy read, not common in sales books. In and among the jewels that he delivers is the real secret to gaining more appointments and even how to get prospects to call you with social prospecting!
His simple 5-Step Telephone Prospecting Framework gives you ideas to power right past objections and resistance. And he offers a powerful technique to double your call backs with a simple and powerful voice mail techniques. Fanatical Prospecting even has a wining technique to build persuasive emails and text messages to convert prospects into customers.
Those chapters alone are more than enough to fill most funnels. In the immortal words of TV pitchman Billy Mays…. But wait…..there’s more!
As much as we would all wish for the instant close, truth is it’s rare and when it happens it is more about the customer being ready NOW, than about our sales skills. Blount shares with us the reality that most activity takes 90 days to pay off and that successful salespeople relentlessly fill their pipeline with a blend of telephone, in-person, text, email, social marketing and cold calling to keep the funnel ALWAYS full!
Blount also takes time to reinforce the value of time blocking. You can never “find time” you can only “block time” on schedule for the tasks that are most important to you professionally and personally. To fail to time block is to fail in finding time, and customers!
To be true there is more meat in the book than can be reviewed! Read it. Digest it. ACT on it and 2017 will be your best year ever!
