36: THIS leads to desperation

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do you sometimes feel a little bit desperate the end of the month of the end of the quarter? Try close all these deals. Jeff Blunt tells us why that is in his book Fanatical Prospecting. Welcome

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to the bite size sales podcast, where we believe that sales is the most important team and a B to B company. That sales team deserves great sales skills training but usually doesn't get it, and that 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 experiences and beat to be sales to bring you simple actual ideas every day to help you get better.

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There have being quite a few times over my career where if I'm honest with myself, I've been sitting there quarter and or month and for a little bit desperate by the situation. I'm n. I'm staring at my forecast, knowing that I need to execute pretty much flawlessly on every single deal to get to the forecast I've rolled up. And the trouble is, of course, is that my prospects are no exactly executing flawlessly themselves on their end. And, you know, sometimes you manage to pull it off, right? You're you ever knows you're working hard, these last two deals and it all comes together and you pull them in and and you're the hero. But then also, there's a lot of times where they don't just come in like that and you end up being the zero. And what's interesting to me is that if I lived back almost all the time in the debrief or the postmortem on the flogging that happens afterwards, the focus of little cells leaders is all about the things that didn't happen with these particular deals. They're very quick to point out all the ways you're deal was shaky and the things you didn't do when you didn't get this buy in and you were, you know, naive or whatever. It is right that the focus in on to try and supposedly help you get better at what you do and very few times do they actually go back to basics and recognize that having to execute flawlessly is not exactly a great situation to be in. And this is the real problem that you've got for yourself, not having each of these deals fall apart the last minute. So Jeb Blunt talks about this in his book Fanatical Prospecting. So let me read directly from it. Right now. It is when pipelines air empty that sales people find themselves face to face with the universal law of need. The universal law of need governs desperation. It's things that the more you need, something that less like it is that you will get it. This law comes into play in sales, with lack of activity has left your pipeline depleted. When all of your hope for survival rests on 12 or even a handful of accounts, the probability of failure increases exponentially. Consider Jerry. His prospecting is inconsistent at best. Several other deals he was counting on and put into his forecast pushed off decisions to next quarter over lost to competitors. Because of this, he has only a handful of viable opportunities left his pipeline. Now, with the end of the quarter looming, Jerry's under tremendous pressure. He desperately needs one of these deals to close. As Jerry becomes more desperate to close anything, he comes face to face with a cruel reality. Desperation magnifies that accelerates failure and virtually guarantees that he won't close the deals he must have to survive. There are several reasons why desperation increases the probability that Jerry will fail when needs to succeed the most. The first is the desperation taps into the down side of the Law of Attraction, which states that what you focus your thoughts on your most likely to get when you're desperate, you knew 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 with desperate need is other people. Consensus your desperation through your actions, tone of voice, words and body language. You send the message that you're desperate and weak prospects and customers naturally repel sales. People who are needy, desperate and pathetic. Instead, they gravitate towards sales professionals who exude confidence. When you reek of the foul stench of desperation. People don't want to do business with you. Finally, when you're desperate, you become emotional and act illogically, which causes you to make poor decisions thes poor decisions, exacerbating an already bad situation, leaving you stressed, miserable and digging a deeper hole. In contrast to Jerri, Sandra is consistently prospecting, networking, getting referrals and systematically moving her accounts through a pipeline or hard worker has resulted in more than 30 opportunities in her funnel. Will they all close? Not likely, however. Sandra feels little pressure. She is consistently replacing the prospects to fall out of her pipeline, and as a result, her sales have been regular, predictable and on target. She knows exactly what she would close tomorrow next week, next month, and she has earned or sales managers trust because she keeps her. Foca keeps her forecast promises under little pressure, she gets a huge boost. When several of the cancer pipeline there were long shots suddenly go her way, she blows aware quota and earns a huge bonus. Sandra didn't need this extra sales gravy yet, but she decided she was disciplined interactivity and it fell right into her lap. So there's no doubt that having a great pipeline solved a whole bunch of problems downstream. You can get away with all sorts of sales mistakes, deal delays, last minute budget freezes, change in personnel, mergers and acquisitions. All these things that go on in the way of doing business. If you've got a healthy pipeline to fall back on, if you're trying to close three from 10 rather than three for four, you're obviously in a much better situation emotionally, but also just Billy the look at the probabilities if you're in that situation. So I'm recording this early in December 2019 and I want to Just if you're listening to this at this point or if you're in the future and you're close to a month and a a quarter, and what my action is for you is don't pause your prospecting to only work on the current deals they're trying to close. I know this is a temptation. I've done it myself where you're focused, you know, naturally focused on trying to get those deals in, right. You want to do the right thing. You want to get everything you can done to make sure they come in. Um, but what happens, I think, is there's a fundamental shift that happens where you feel like you're expend all your mental energy on these deals and drop everything else, and that's a mistake. And I think if we're honest with ourselves, we can find some time to get focused back on the priority of prospecting. And I think the way to look at it is if you look in your whatever are weak that you have with its 40 hours of 50 hires, whatever you're putting in, can you find one hour a day just one hour day during this busy period to focus on prospecting for new opportunities for kyu won and cue to our next year? I bet you can if you prioritize it and you recognize the importance of it and you time block it in your counter to take action. If you like this episode, please share it white and far spread

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the word. I get energy from seeing people download and use this content, so please just take 20 seconds to share with anyone you think would like it, too. This'll episode is sponsored by unstoppable dot do most sales teams are not trained effectively the skills of mindset they deserve and these are the most important people in the company is no wonder that only about 50% of reps make quarter every year. Unstoppable is a service that help sellers and leaders get great at those skills and mindset they need without taking time out of the field. It exists because if the sales team has the right skills on mindset, they thrive there confident,

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and they perform much better. Find out Maur and even get a free sales book at bite size sales dot com. No to wrap up as Nick Kaylie, VP Financial Service is

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at four drug May or may not have one said training without implementation is just entertainment and pretty poor entertainment when one does it to make sure you take action on what you learn to keep getting better every day, this world does not need more sales b s. So don't create any more. Be great, the fundamentals Be honest. Be really be yourself. Just do not B s. And finally, I'm setting offers The great Joe Sexton would by saying gone too so