INTRODUCTION

Turning the Unpredictable into the Predictable

Just as we were putting the finishing touches on this book, we had the opportunity to interview the highest-performing account executive at a high-growth, business-to-business (B2B) technology company. Our conversation with her went like this:

“Let’s schedule an hour-long block so that we can observe how you prospect.” We began this way because we like to watch people in action. (If you ask people to tell you what they do, they tell you what they think you want to hear. If you ask people to tell you what they did, they tell you the good parts and skip the bad.)

“Uh . . . well . . . I don’t actually do any cold prospecting anymore,” she replied.

“Really?”

“Yeah. I did when I joined a couple years ago. Now, most of my calls are warm.”

“How so?”

“We sell seats, annual subscriptions, to individual users. Outside of doing quarterly value reviews, I spend most of my time working internal referrals,” she answered.

“When was the last time you called on a new logo?” we persisted.

“About six months ago, we did a blitz day. I think I still have the spreadsheet I used . . .” She opened her laptop and started tapping away. “Here it is,” she said, turning the screen toward us.

Staring at the spreadsheet, one of us asked, “What does that column labeled ‘Activity’ indicate?”

“That’s a record of what I did.” We noticed every cell in that column read “e-mail.” She boasted, “It worked really well. I sent out about 50 e-mails, and I got 5 good replies.”

“Did you ever reach out again to the other 45, or was it a one-and-done project?”

With a little less bravado, she answered, “One and done. The blitz was over.”

This story is the story of almost every B2B salesperson who survives the first two years in a job. At first they work hard as hunters, making painful, proactive phone calls and drafting cold e-mails. After a while, they have a full book of business to service, after which, somewhere along the line, they transition from hunter to farmer. Ultimately, for sales professionals operating purely in account management mode, the three- or four-year mark becomes very dangerous. No matter how well they engage their existing accounts, a certain number of accounts will not renew for any number of reasons. Maybe their main advocate has changed roles or has moved to a new employer. Maybe the competition has built a better mousetrap. Regardless of the reason, the salesperson is inevitably faced with a gap to making his or her quota and a dry pipeline.

This book is designed for sales development professionals and account executives who want to maintain full, predictable pipelines. Broadly speaking, a complete sales training program consists of insight into (1) specific clients and their use cases; (2) the company’s products, marketing, competitive positioning, and so on; (3) selling skills such as communication, time management, goal setting, and negotiating; (4) technology platforms, especially customer relationship management (CRM) tools; and (5) sales processes. There are plenty of great books that focus on the first four areas. In this book we delve deeply and exclusively into the process for filling the top of the sales funnel because, without that process, there is no predictability.

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Part I focuses on targeting. Chapter 1 provides a framework for internalizing a value proposition and competitive position. Chapter 2 helps sales professionals create an Ideal Account Profile (IAP) so that they can target those accounts with the fastest velocity and the highest lifetime value. Skipping or spending too little time defining an IAP is one of the biggest mistakes salespeople make; they pay a dear cost in time wasted on accounts that may never buy. Chapter 3 explores building an Ideal Prospect Persona (IPP) to ensure that salespeople spend their precious time on the right people in the right accounts.

Part II deals with engaging prospects at the beginning of the buying process. Chapter 4 provides valuable templates for phone and e-mail messaging. Chapter 5 reveals multitouch, multichannel techniques for securing first meetings. Chapter 6 provides a simplified method for the qualifying process, the last stage of the top of the funnel. It is here the Predictable Prospecting process ends, leaving the buying process and closing to other experts. We are also conscious of the fact that closing is incredibly context-dependent in modern B2B selling; hence, crafting a predictable closing process is an extreme if not impossible challenge.

Part III circles back around to the continuous improvement of the Predictable Prospecting process. Chapter 7 covers metrics-based optimization so that salespeople and their colleagues can share and evolve best practices. Chapter 8 considers categories of prospecting enablement tools. Chapter 9 covers managing sales development for establishing or effectively leading an outbound prospecting function. Chapter 10 highlights the 12 habits of the most successful sales development representatives (SDRs).

We strongly recommend that you read the chapters of this book in order and resist the temptation to skip around because we have designed each process step to build constructively into the Predictable Prospecting model.

You will notice that open-mindedness is the common theme that runs throughout the book. Prospecting is context-dependent in every imaginable way. Success depends on aligning the product (or service), the seller, and the prospect. Is feature selling, consultative selling, or solution selling best for such alignment? It depends. Is highly customized account-based prospecting better than mass-personalized prospecting? It depends. Our approach is not intended to be evasive but rather to encourage sales professionals to examine and understand their selling context. Yet, we also try to be prescriptive. For example, if a salesperson has a focused territory with a limited number of high-value accounts, then of course account-based prospecting is the correct approach. Similarly, whether to use feature selling versus consultative selling versus solution selling is totally dependent on how individual prospects prefer to buy.

We understand that proactive prospecting is hard, often thankless work intertwined with rejection, but in this book we promise that it can be predictable. Although we can’t promise that predictable processing will be effortless, we can promise that it will be simple and straightforward. It can even be a little bit fun if SDRs approach every day as a game by split-testing communication approaches to measure what does and does not work. Now, let’s get started.