Foreword

There is a raging epidemic in sales that is devouring sales performance, holding companies back from reaching growth objectives, wrecking sales cultures, and undermining the promising careers of sales professionals and sales leaders alike.

Today, the number one issue facing salespeople, sales leaders, executives, and entire companies is anemic—and sometimes non-existent—pipelines. It’s the top complaint I get from C-level executives about their sales teams. Even as new tools and technology emerge that make identifying and connecting with prospects easier than ever, companies are struggling to get their salespeople to consistently prospect.

Prospecting skills are basic and foundational competencies for sales success. There is a direct line that connects the failure to prospect to the failure to produce sales. This is why eighty percent of salespeople who wash out and get fired in their first year do so because they are reluctant to prospect.

Yet over the past few years, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend: More and more self-styled “gurus” are popping up and pontificating to the sales profession that one form or another of prospecting is dead. They pander to the salespeople who are scared of, or uncomfortable with, prospecting. Left in their wake are millions of “vegetarian” salespeople (as my friend Anthony Iannarino likes to call them) who can’t or won’t hunt.

Across the industry spectrum, salespeople are frustrated, failing, and earning far less than they should because they don’t know how to prospect, have no guidance or structure for prospecting, and are confused by the endless stream of mixed messages. Sadly, and more often than not, instead of focusing time and attention on the root causes of their sales performance problems, they spin their wheels chasing flavor-of-the-day magic pills and “easy buttons” that frustratingly never seem to make a difference.

Sales leaders, who themselves are under intense pressure to produce results, find that driving their salespeople to build bigger prospecting pipelines—in many cases with yelling, screaming, and threatening—is like pushing a rope, because their salespeople don’t know what to do. Meanwhile, sales training programs rarely offer deep-dive training on prospecting. It is as if salespeople are supposed to come to the job with the innate ability to open new doors, a comprehensive set of prospecting techniques, the know-how to engage prospects across multiple prospecting channels, and the mental toughness to sustain unrelenting rejection.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to accelerate prospecting and build massively productive sales pipelines. The key is a back-to-the-basics focus on sales prospecting techniques. This new focus begins with tuning out the pseudo experts who peddle their “one-size-fits-all-easy-buttons” and turning toward masters like Mark Hunter.

Mark has helped thousands of sales professionals reach peak sales performance and is a trusted advisor to hundreds of executives and companies across the globe. He is committed to teaching real prospecting tactics and techniques that work with real prospects in the real world. Mark’s been in the trenches just like you, and he knows his stuff. In this book, he will help you understand both the why and how behind the most important activity in sales. He will give you a road map for building and executing a daily prospecting plan that will get you into the front office and the C-suite. Step by step, you’ll gain the techniques and confidence you’ll need to fill your pipeline with high-quality and highly qualified prospects. Following Mark’s easy-to-understand formula, you’ll soon be reaching the upper echelons of your company’s sales rankings. Get your highlighter out, because this is a book you’ll read, re-read, and refer back to often.

It’s time to put prospecting back into sales.

—JEB BLOUNT,

CEO of Sales Gravy (www.salesgravy.com/)
and author of the best-selling books Fanatical Prospecting
and People Buy You