12: Are you OK with interrupting?

To be good at prospecting. You've got to be okay with interrupting people. That's what you have to do to create your own opportunities. So says Jeb blunt in his book, fanatical prospecting

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welcome to the bite sized sales podcast where we believe that sales is the most important team in a B to B company. That complacency is the enemy and taking bite-size steps each day to get better at your craft is the best way to improve results. I am your host, Andrew Monahan and I'm using my 26 years of experience in B2B sales to bring you small actionable ideas every day to help you get better

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In the summer of 1994 I took my first job out of college and I was hired as a trainee sales rep by a small enterprise software company in London in the UK. The structure was we had a small sales team, but we also had a marketing team that fed us leads on a daily basis and our job was to basically follow up on them and try and drive opportunities like that and it worked pretty well. You know, this was a point in the golden age when leads were good and , uh , people, the buyers, the decision makers were not overwhelmed already with people trying to get in touch with them. So the whole format worked well. One day my manager suggested to me that I was ready to start making cold calls instead of just doing the, the, the lead follow up . That was the common way of doing it. I remember thinking, are you nuts? You know, you're expecting me to call someone completely out of the blue, someone pretty senior in the it organization. You know, what the heck am I going to say to them? Um, you know, my head trash was, they're never gonna want to talk to me. Uh, I got nothing meaningful to say to them. This is a crazy idea. Right? Um, but, you know, I , I couldn't , I had to go with it and I was kinda young, young and foolish, so, so pick up the phone and start making calls. And I remember the first time I actually got through to someone , uh , explain the reason for why I was making the call. And I probably threw out some of the problem statements that we solved and the guy could have pause a second, said , uh , sure. Okay . You know, let's meet. And I think I almost fell off my chair. Right . I was kind of blown away with the idea that this quite senior person had said to me based on a 32nd one minute , elevator pitch almost that he would meet with me. I was, I was blown away. And you know, from that moment on, throughout my whole career, I've always done prospecting like that. I've done cold calling, you know, I , I can't honestly say I've ever loved it. Uh , but I've done it and I've got great results and I've got different stories at different points in my career where , you know, you know, good telephone prospecting really worked for me. Um, but the key to bite it , it was that I had to become comfortable with the idea that I was actually going to reach out to someone. I was gonna interrupt their day, interrupt them at their moment in time, and put my agenda on the table. Right. And , uh , once I got the head trash , uh , the way about doing that, that's when I could actually be successful. And Jeb blunt in his book, fanatical prospecting talks about this under the section the fine art of interrupting and he says, so the gurus and thought leaders rage on over whether to cold call or not to cold call, but their bluster is really just an inane argument focused on semantics of degrees, cold, warm, smoldering, hot, smoking hot and mostly centered on how to avoid ever having to make an outbound call to a prospect. Again, this is why I'm going to tell you the truth, the real truth that all of these so called experts continue to ignore and has nothing to do the cold calling. Here's the deal. If you want to sustain success in your sales career, if you want to maximize your income, then you've got to interrupt prospects. You'll have to pick up the phone, walk in the door, send an email or text message or ping a prospect on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and interrupt someone who is not expecting you to contact them, I. E. you don't have an appointment or they're not waiting for you to call or right and with whom you're not currently engaged in a sales discussion. You can argue the degrees , warm, hot, cold, whatever. It could be a prospect have filled out one of your web forms or downloaded your latest white paper. Maybe they just connected with you online. It could be an old customers. You're an old customer, you're trying to reactivate or a prospect in your defined database or a new business that you've stopped by to qualify or a prospect you met at a trade show. No matter the circumstance. The simple fact remains that you are interrupting their day to talk about something you want them to hear , do or buy and you do not have a scheduled appointment with them to have that conversation. This is what gets missed in all the useless noise about how cold calling is dead. All of the talking heads who promise an easy we add if you'll just join the little cult, ignore the real person. That prospecting is so hard no matter how you choose to do it. It has never been about degree of the call. It has always been about the willingness on the part of the salesperson to interate , which by the way is why most sales reps protests so loudly and we'll do anything to avoid making a phone call. It is so much easier to speak to someone who is calling you. The problem is most companies can create enough qualified inbound leads to keep the pipeline full. And by the way, the reps that worked for companies that do generate enough inbound leads to keep the phones ring, are making far less than sales pros who are reaching out and interrupting prospects to create

opportunities.

So this is what I find in my life when I read that. You know that that rang true for me. Um, you know, if all you're doing is following up on leads, you're not adding as much value to the business as if you're going to create opportunities yourself with prospects when you reach out to them. Cold and interrupt. So the real question for you as you're listening to this is how comfortable are you with interrupting? How much do you stick to your outreach plan as opposed to falling up on your inbound? You know, I encourage you to challenge yourself to do it more. You will be more valuable to your employer if you're a critical opportunities than if you just follow up on leads and we get paid more to do the difficult things that bring great results and pay less if you do the easy things that create more simple results and you know, organizations, one, people who are value creators working for them and will commonly pay more for that than those that are not value creators. So my challenge to you is be a value creator, interrupt people and create opportunities.

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