a Combo Prospecting: The Powerful One-Two Punch That Fills Your Pipeline and Wins Sales

by Tony Hughes

Overview

How do you break through to impossible-to-reach executive buyers who are intent on blocking out the noise that confronts them every day?

In a world where everyone is completely inundated by phone calls, drop-ins, pop-up ads, and junk mail, how can you and your product begin to make its impression known in the business world? By learning how to combine time-tested sales processes with cutting-edge social media strategies.

Sales expert and author Tony J. Hughes details today’s new breed of chief executive buyers, the channels they use, the value narratives that they find appealing, and the mix of methods that will grab their attention.

In Combo Prospecting, you will learn how to:

• Locate leverage points that matter
• Secure decision-maker meetings
• Build a knockout online brand that distinguishes you from the pack
• Build a constantly growing list of profitable referrals
• And much more!

Old-school prospecting tactics are growing increasingly irrelevant in today’s tech-savvy online business world. However, new-school techniques alone have proven to not be able to provide the answers. The key to your success is to learn how to unleash a killer combination of old and new sales strategies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814439111
Publisher:	AMACOM
Publication date:	01/11/2018
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tony has served as head of sales for public corporations and as the Asia-pacific CEO for tier-one global technology companies. With two previous books, Tony is a best-selling author and renowned keynote speaker, and has been consistently ranked as a top 3 influencer on sales globally. He is co-founder and sales Innovation Director at Sales IQ Global and sits on a number of advisory boards. Tony has also taught sales for three universities and his clients include Salesforce, SAP, Schneider Electric, New Zealand Government, Salesforce, TAL Life, Grant Thornton, BAE Systems, Oracle, Flight Centre Travel Group, Red Hat and UBT with their 4,000 member companies globally.

Read an Excerpt

Introduction: Fight Club and Knockout Commitments

"If you set yourself on fire, the world will come to see you burn."

—DON KING

LOOK DOWN AT YOUR HANDS. HANDS OF LOVE BUT ALSO HANDS of steel—make them into fists. If you take just one thing from this book, let it be this: The left is social, the right is the phone—blended together, they are the social phone, a term coined by Kenny Madden. In boxing, you jab with your left to offensively keep yourself safe and set them up for a knockout with your right hook or uppercut. For sales, you jab repeatedly with digital outreach via LinkedIn, email, text messages, Twitter, and even Facebook; you are setting up a knockout with the phone. The prospect or customer is not your enemy; rather, you are combating any apathy, walls, or resistance that may surround them.

Anyone who claims that you can succeed with one hand tied behind your back is just plain wrong. Social and digital alone fail. Phone alone fails. Passive attraction strategies alone fail. Intelligent combinations are the only way to win, and this is the essence of COMBO Prospecting. COMBO refers to this combination, and it is also an acronym for Command Over Maximizing Business Opportunities.

Right now, you may be failing to realize your real potential. There is no question that the Pareto principle applies to sales prospecting. This principle states that 20 percent of the input invested results in 80 percent of the outcome. So how do you stop wasting 80 percent of your time and start landing that 20 percent where the real opportunity is? No matter how passionately you sell, you must still battle the evil forces of competition, commoditization, globalization, disruption, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI) technology—because they all seek to eliminate your very livelihood. Winning requires dramatic changes in how you operate. By embracing technology with real human engagement, you can prosper in the arena of sales. This combination will elevate you and make you hyper-effective in breaking through to engage with the impossible-to-reach people who need your help.

Excerpted from COMBO PROSPECTING: The Powerful One-Two Punch That Fills Your Pipeline and Wins Sales by Tony J. Hughes. Copyright © 2018 Tony J. Hughes. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION: Fight Club and Knockout Commitments 1

COMBO Explained and Calls to Put Me in Jail 5

Misplaced Confidence and My Journey into Sales 8

Why You Need to Be the Hottest One at the Bar 15

CHAPTER ONE: Awful Truths That Can Set You Free 23

Wake Up and Get in the Fight! 24

Behold the Stately Honey Badger Who Never Gets Fired 31

Extract Your Head from the Darkness; Facts Don't Lie 32

The Great Disruption of Your Precious Livelihood 38

Cyborg Sellers in the Age of the Machines 44

Go Big, Bust Out, and Break Through 50

Winning Combinations of Old and New 54

Blooding Your COMBO Strategy 60

Why Savvy Social Sellers Still Call Like Crazy 63

The Lunacy of Cold-Calling vs. Social Selling 66

Why Being Beat Up Is Good for the Soul 70

CHAPTER TWO: Earning the Right to Win 73

Foundations of Executive Engagement 74

The Language of Leaders and Relevance Challenge 76

Paradox of Nonhunger and Genuine Curiosity 79

Friending and Relationship Selling 80

The Truth About Trust and Value 82

The Art of Pragmatic Research 87

Leading with Insight and Why a Conversation Matters 88

Creating Your Own Value Narrative 90

Questions That Qualify and Set the Agenda 93

The Power of Truly Listening 97

Strategic Selling in the Real World 99

Social Selling Framework Defined 103

Building a Winning Business Case 106

Engineering Consensus 111

Opening Is the New Closing 113

CHAPTER THREE: Building Your Platform 117

Creating Your Online Brand 119

Publishing Insights That Set the Agenda 123

Nurturing a Network That Enables You to Thrive 128

Creating Effective Scripts and Templates 130

Selecting the Right Enablement Tools 133

Nurturing the Machine That Feeds You Leads 136

Account-Based Everything 142

CHAPTER FOUR: Executing Your COMBO Strategy 147

Be Your Own Sales Development Rep (SDR) 153

Shocking Paradoxes That Govern Prospecting 159

Time-Blocking—Discipline Within the Hours 162

Trigger Events and Social Listening 163

Referrals—The Path of Highest Probability 164

Advanced Technique Playbook 166

Insider Secrets of Savvy Sellers 172

The Importance of Multi-Threading 176

COMBOs to Conquer Executive ADD 178

Breaking Through to CXOs and Board Members 180

Anatomy of Giving Good Social Phone 181

Growth Hacks—Thinking like a Marketer 188

Ghost Your Own CEO's Profile 191

Sales Coaching from a CEO Buyer 194

Supercharge Lead Flow—Pulling It All Together 197

Turning Up the Heat Deeper in the Funnel 201

Dispelling Myths of the Serial Closer 202

CHAPTER FIVE: The Act of Personal Sales Leadership 211

Fight, Fight, Fight to Earn the Right 213

Avoiding the Roller-Coaster Performance Ride 216

80/20 Power Laws and Personal Effectiveness 223

Why You Must Become a Mentor and Coach 225

Resources 229

Endnotes 231

Index 237