Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling

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The Law of Familiarity

After seeing a lot of the world, I now tend to return to the same spots. I enjoy the familiarity.

—Louise Nurding

The more familiar a prospect is with you, your brand, and/or your company, the more likely they will be to accept and return your calls, open your e-mails, accept a social media connection request, respond to a text message, accept an invite to an event or webinar, download information from a link you sent them, engage in sales conversations, and ultimately do business with you.

That's the Law of Familiarity.

This is supported by data that indicates that it can take between 20 and 50 touches to engage a prospect with little to no familiarity with you or your company, but just 1 to 10 touches to engage an inactive customer, warm inbound lead, or prospect who has a high degree of familiarity with you, your company, or your brand.

The lack of familiarity is why you get so many objections to your requests for your prospects’ time. When prospects don't know you, it's much harder to get in the door.

Prospecting Lubrication

This is why it's in your best interest to invest time and effort to build familiarity with your prospects. Familiarity lubricates prospecting because it makes the prospect's decision to give you their time feel less risky.

There even comes a point when a prospect will readily communicate and build a “first-name” relationship with you—even when they aren't interested in buying at the moment. Sean Burke, CEO of KiteDesk, calls ...