Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

—Dale Carnegie, writer and lecturer

The unrelenting daily imperative for every military recruiter is keeping the funnel full of qualified prospects.

Ultra-high performers spend as much as 80 percent of their time on prospecting and qualifying activities for one important reason. A full applicant funnel means less stress and consistent mission contribution.

There are three core laws of prospecting that when heeded will ensure that you are moving a steady stream of new applicants into the funnel:

1. The Universal Law of Need
2. The 30-Day Rule
3. The Law of Replacement

In this chapter, we discuss the implications of these universal laws for success in recruiting. You will also learn why ignoring these laws causes recruiting slumps and how to get out of a slump if you find yourself in one.

The Universal Law of Need

It is when funnels are empty that recruiters find themselves face to face with the Universal Law of Need. This law comes into play in recruiting when lack of prospecting activity has left your funnel depleted.

The Universal Law of Need states that the more you need the enlistment, the less likely it is that you will get it. When all of your hope for making mission rests on one, two, or even a handful of prospects or applicants, the probability that you will miss mission increases exponentially.

Consider Staff Sergeant Williams; her prospecting activity is inconsistent at best. Several applicants she was counting on were disqualified at MEPS. Because of this, she has only one applicant remaining in her funnel.

Now, with the end of the month (Phase Line) looming, Williams is under tremendous pressure to avoid a zero (and pulling contracts forward from the next PL). She desperately needs this applicant to enlist.

As she becomes more desperate, she comes face to face with a cruel reality: Desperation magnifies and accelerates failure and virtually guarantees the enlistment won’t come through.

There are several reasons why desperation increases the probability that Williams will fail when she needs to succeed the most:

• The first is that desperation taps into the downside of the Law of Attraction, which states that what you focus your thoughts on, you are most likely to receive. When you are desperate, you no longer focus your thoughts on what is required for success. Instead, you focus on what will happen to you if you don’t get what you need, thereby attracting failure.
• The next problem, because emotions are contagious, is other people can sense your desperation. Through your actions, tone of voice, words, and body language, you send the message that you are desperate and weak. That you lack confidence. Prospects and parents naturally repel recruiters who are needy and pathetic. When you reek of the foul stench of desperation, people don’t enlist with you.
• Finally, when you are desperate, you become emotional and act illogically, which causes you to make poor decisions—like scratching lottery tickets by sending unqualified applicants to the floor; wasting time and energy endlessly seeking waivers for poorly qualified applicants; or wasting time in the delusional and desperate attempt to turn Cat-4 s into Alphas. You may also make mistakes that can potentially ruin your career through investigation for recruiter misconduct and integrity violations.

In contrast to Williams, Sergeant First Class Santos is consistently prospecting, networking, gaining referrals, and systematically moving her applicants through the funnel. Her hard work has resulted in six Alphas and three Bravos in her funnel.

Will they all enlist? Maybe. However, Santos feels little pressure. She only needs to enlist one. Through her focus on daily prospecting, she is consistently replacing the applicants who fall out of her funnel. As a result, her productivity has been consistent and predictably on target.

She knows with confidence that she’ll contribute to mission success and exactly how many enlistments she’ll deliver tomorrow, next week, and next month. She has earned the trust of her command because she is dependable and consistently delivers.

Because her funnel is full, she exudes a relaxed and confident demeanor that allows her to attract and engage the highest qualified prospects. Santos gets a huge boost when she picks up an Alpha applicant through a referral—out of the blue. She didn’t need this extra recruiting gravy, yet because she was disciplined in her activity, it fell right into her lap. The “Recruiting Gods” reward prospecting activity.

The 30-Day Rule

In military recruiting, the 30-Day Rule is always in play. The 30-Day Rule states that the prospecting you do in any given 30-day period will pay off over the next 90 days. It is a simple yet powerful universal rule that governs military recruiting—and you ignore it at your peril. When you embrace and internalize this rule, you will never again put prospecting aside for another day.

Sergeant Carter hit a bad slump. The previous quarter he’d exceeded mission and been the hero of his battalion. It was just his second quarter on the team. During his first three months in the field as a recruiter, he’d enthusiastically dived into prospecting, and it paid off. He scored seven enlistments.

But over the past couple of months, he’d allowed himself to get caught up in building packets, processing applicants, and handling admin work. He became complacent and stopped prospecting.

In his fifth month as a recruiter, Carter woke up to his second zero month, and his NCOIC in his face demanding that he get back on track. It was an up-front and close experience with the brutal reality that in recruiting it is not about who you have enlisted but rather who you enlist today.

When Carter reached out to me for help, he was in a precarious situation. His recruiting funnel was empty, and he felt like he was facing an uphill battle that he could never win. He justified his failure to prospect with all of the admin work he was required to do. He was sporting a piss-poor attitude and a ruck full of excuses. He complained that MEPS was the devil, the Army’s qualification requirements were too stringent, his schools were against him, flighty teenagers wouldn’t commit, and the helicopter parents were too afraid to let go.

I explained the 30-Day Rule and gave one clear and unambiguous order: “Quit whining and get on the phone and start dialing. Go get in your schools and out in the community and start talking to people.”

To his credit, Carter took my advice and started prospecting—one call, one touch, one conversation at a time.

At first it didn’t feel like he was making any progress—when you are desperate, you try to will the world to conform to your unreasonable deadlines. He felt that he was just going through the motions and sinking deeper into quicksand. He was working hard, doing the toughest work in recruiting, and still not getting enlistments.

But each day of calling and talking to potential recruits on the street and in his schools added opportunities to his pipeline. As he rebuilt his funnel, he rediscovered his confidence and sense of self-worth.

Carter stuck with it, and 90 days later he was once again the number-one recruiter in his company. The impact of daily prospecting on his performance—from zero to hero in just three months—made an indelible impression on Sergeant Carter. It was a lesson he never had to learn again.

The implication of the 30-Day Rule is simple. Miss a day of prospecting and it will tend to bite you sometime in the next 90 days. Miss a week and you’re in jeopardy of missing mission. Blow off an entire month of prospecting, and Charlie Foxtrot. You tank your pipeline, roll a series of zeros, fall into a slump, and wake up 90 days later desperate, feeling like a loser, with no clue how you ended up there.

The Law of Replacement

Let’s take a look at Master Sergeant Donald’s recruiting pipeline. His write rate is 1:10 or ten percent. In other words, out of ten conducts, he contracts one.

• Question: If Donald has ten applicants in his funnel and enlists one, how many remain in his funnel?

When I ask this question in Fanatical Military Recruiting Bootcamps, most recruiters answer nine. But they are wrong.

• The answer is: zero.

So how can 10 − 1 = 0? Here’s the math.

Based on his statistical conversion funnel, Donald has a probability of 1 in 10 of enlisting an applicant. The net result is that when he enlists one applicant, the other nine applicants are no longer viable. His applicant funnel will be reduced by ten. One enlisted, and the other nine will either back out, won’t be granted a waiver, or will be disqualified at MEPS.

• Replacement: To keep his pipeline full, Donald must now replace those ten applicants with new opportunities.

The Law of Replacement can be a difficult concept to understand because it is a statistical formula. You may in fact argue against it, asking how we could know that the other nine applicants won’t enlist. To make this argument, however, is missing the point. We are talking about statistical probabilities based on measurable conversion ratios. The stats tell us that over the long run, Master Sergeant Donald must replace those applicants to keep his recruiting funnel healthy and consistently make mission month in and month out.

The Law of Replacement is a critical concept to internalize, because failure to heed this law is the reason recruiters find themselves at the feast or famine amusement park riding on the desperation roller coaster. Up and down. Up and down. Constant stress. A hero one month, a total zero the next.

The lesson the Law of Replacement teaches is that you must constantly be pushing new applicants into your funnel so that you’re replacing those who will naturally fall out. And you must do so at a rate that matches or exceeds your enlistment conversion ratio. This is the science of the recruiting funnel and the key to sustained, consistent success. It is why you must never, ever, ever stop prospecting.

The Anatomy of a Recruiting Slump

Ninety-nine percent of recruiting slumps can be linked directly to a failure to prospect. The anatomy of a recruiting slump looks something like this:

• At some point, you stopped prospecting (see the 30-Day Rule).
• Because you stopped prospecting, your pipeline stalls (see the Law of Replacement).
• You replace prospecting for new applicants with chasing the applicants in your funnel who have gone dark and wasting time with those who are unqualified.
• But those applicants are never going to enlist.
• You grow dependent on walk-ins, call-ins, and “hot” leads.
• You miss mission.
• As you experience this failure, your confidence erodes.
• Your crumbling confidence creates negative self-talk, and that further degrades your confidence, wrecks your enthusiasm, and causes you to feel like a loser.
• Feeling like a loser saps your energy and motivation for prospecting activity.
• Because you don’t feel like prospecting, you double down—desperately calling the same dead-end applicants over and over. You get nowhere.
• The lack of prospecting activity makes your already stale pipeline even worse.
• You start hoping for silver bullets, scratching lottery tickets, and praying for a Cat-4 day to open. But because hope is not a strategy, nothing changes.
• You roll a zero.
• You sink deeper into your slump, get desperate, and then bam! You get slapped by the Universal Law of Need.
• You roll another zero.
• Your self-esteem and confidence take another hit.
• Your recruiting days become depressing black holes of stress, misery, and lame excuses.
• You’d rather be anywhere other than here.

Sooner or later, you will let down your guard and find yourself in desperate need of an enlistment. The cumulative impact of your poor decisions, procrastination, fear, lack of focus, and even laziness will have added up. Suddenly you find yourself in a slump and scrambling to make mission.

You can recover, but first you must acknowledge where the blame for your predicament lies. When you find yourself in a desperate situation, it’s easy to fall back on human nature and blame everything and everyone for your plight except, of course, yourself.

The Universal Law of Need doesn’t punish others, though. It punishes you for your failure to execute the daily disciplines required for success.

Oscar Mike: The First Rule of Recruiting Slumps

The first rule of holes is when you are in one, stop digging, and the first rule of recruiting slumps is when you are in one, get moving and start prospecting. The only real way to get out of a recruiting slump is to get back up to the plate and start swinging.

When you find yourself in a slump, take a breath, acknowledge that your negative emotions are just making things worse, and commit yourself to daily prospecting. Do whatever it takes to get your mind focused on prospecting and committing to daily goals. This begins with an honest look in the mirror and taking responsibility for your own culpability for the slump.

Don’t spend a moment in thought about what might happen to you if you don’t find qualified applicants. Worry won’t change the future. Likewise, don’t get mired down in regret over what you have failed to do. You cannot change the past.

Instead, put all your energy, emotion, and effort into actions that you control. Success in military recruiting is a simple equation of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual activity. In other words, you are in complete control of your future. When you go back to the basics and focus on the right activity, the results will come. Be aware, though, that it will take at least 30 days of sustained and dedicated daily activity to get back on track.

Make Your Own Luck

One of my absolute favorite quotes comes from the late, great golfer Arnold Palmer: “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”

There is a parallel in recruiting: The more you prospect, the luckier you get.

Will training, experience, and technique make you a better prospector? Of course. However, it is far more important that you prospect consistently than that you prospect using the best techniques. When you prospect consistently—and that means talking to new people every day—you will make mission.

The cumulative impact of daily prospecting is massive. You begin to connect with the right prospects, with the right message, at just the right time. Suddenly, referrals drop in your lap out of nowhere, Alphas and Prior Service start calling you, and Unicorns walk into your storefront looking for you. The Recruiting Gods reward you for your hard work. You get “lucky.”

Most recruiters never get lucky though because they only do the minimum amount of prospecting required to just squeak by. And when they do start prospecting (usually out of desperation), they expect instant miracles. When those miracles don’t happen, they gripe that prospecting doesn’t work and crawl back into the warm comfort of mediocrity.

You can’t expect to make prospecting calls for a single day and get miracles any more than you could expect to hit the driving range once and go on to win the US Open. It requires consistent commitment and discipline over time—a little bit every day.

So, go hit the phones, work your schools, initiate conversations with students, talk to strangers everywhere you go, canvass, send e-mails and text messages, ask for referrals, set up and work events, and leverage social media. Be fanatical. Don’t let anything or anyone stop you.

The more you prospect, the luckier you get.