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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Social Selling

Sales is a blend of art and science. The art is influencing people to make commitments. The science is influencing the right people.

—Jeb Blount

The influence of social media in today's society is inescapable. Millions of people are linked together on social media sites—constantly checking and updating their status. As a business tool, social media has moved from cutting edge to ubiquitous.

As I write this book, social selling is one of the hottest buzzwords in the sales profession.

There is no doubt that the social selling (sometimes called social prospecting) channel is a critical component of a balanced prospecting methodology.

I believe that for the sales profession, social media is the most important technological advancement since the telephone. There has never been a time in sales when so much information about so many buyers was so easy to access. And not just contact information, but context. Through the social channel, we gain glimpses into our prospects’ behavior, desires, preferences, and triggers that drive buying behavior and open buying windows.

The social channel gives us the ability to easily and economically build familiarity through low-impact, nonintrusive techniques. We can easily map the buyers, influencers, potential coaches, and other stakeholders at our prospective accounts and strategically uncover buying motivations and interests that lead to more impactful and robust in-person conversations. We can monitor our competitors and industry ...