CHAPTER FOUR

Executing Your COMBO Strategy

“To hell with circumstances, I create opportunities . . . The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.”

—BRUCE LEE

INSIGHT, CHALLENGER, AND SPIN CAN ALL BE APPLIED FOR top-of-funnel activities, but most people are focusing on deals already under way. The key to landing a meeting is the relevant insight that hooks the prospect into talking with you. Are you challenging how they see their business and reframing commonly held beliefs? You must ask the right provocative questions in outreach that uncover implications of unaddressed current-state status quo and the business case benefits of change versus the cost of inaction.

The devil is in the details, and the majority of human things fall down in the execution. In order for you to have resounding success in the application of the concepts in this book, you’ll have to take my word for a few things on intelligent faith (not an oxymoron like “military intelligence”).

There are laws of COMBO Prospecting that you must follow. If you social sell only, you will fail. If you wield the phone only, you will fail. If you blast away with email and InMail only, you will fail. Trainers will preach the contact rates you can achieve, but honestly you’ll most likely reach 2 or 3 out of 100 with phone calls alone.

The bedazzling ingredient for dramatically increasing the rate of success is combinations. COMBOs unlock bizarre amounts of email response and enable you to break through and set meetings with the people who matter. Here are the essentials to effectively execute any form of COMBO:

Your personal brand and value narrative must support the tone of outreach across every channel.

You must dedicate yourself to being concise. Everything must resonate on a mobile device. Brevity is the soul of wit and cut-through.

Commit to a minimum two-hour time-block (no distractions) every day for hard-core in-the-ring COMBO activity based on call lists you created before you left work the previous day.

You are not running a COMBO if you have not included the phone at the heart of the strategy.

You need powerful sales tools, including Sales Navigator and sales intelligence software that ethically sources cell phone numbers and direct dials.

You must leverage time to complete every combination as fast as humanly possible to capture attention in this ADD-afflicted world.

You quickly and pragmatically create context for outreach and phone calls so that they are warm rather than cold.

Closing sales takes five to eight touches, so leverage best-of-breed marketing automation to score, nurture, and follow up.

These are hard lines I’m drawing in the sand. If you’re not willing to shift your weight to the front foot or hold your leading hand up to prevent being punched in the face, you’re going to get knocked out. The legendary fight in July 2017 between Manny Pacquiao (the only person to be a world champion in eight divisions) and the almost unknown Aussie battler Jeff Horn, who defeated him, showed two people committed to always moving forward and keeping their hands up. You cannot be a winner unless you do, and it applies metaphorically in business and sales. I learned similar lessons in karate and also in flying—you must commit 100 percent to the takeoff and go full throttle.

The phone should always be prioritized. If your opportunity is warm, call. If they want to negotiate price, call. If you just got an email in response, call. If something happens in social, call. If you can’t call, ask for a phone number and call. Always default to calling in every aspect of your sales process.

My own epiphany about COMBO came from watching a top-performing salesperson execute combinations in the morning before he went to the gym at lunch. It seemed like his three hours were more effective than the entire SDR team in North America that month. He inspired the theme of this book. Not only was he doing what others weren’t, he was logging everything in the Salesforce CRM. He is a winner at every level and just eats rejection for breakfast with disciplined movement toward his goal every day. He was masterful with the platforms and technology, he trusted his competence and the numbers, and he executed in a disciplined manner. The CRM was not optional. It was a mandatory part of his process. Complete pro!

He showed the team what he did, but they showed little interest. Behind his back they were disparaging. They only emailed and lengthened the message, but they couldn’t break through. They thought it was just his “magic.” They didn’t see the COMBOs in plain sight. They would go into the CRM and emulate him, sending the same exact message, and they still failed. But then the penny dropped for one of them—this person saw that it wasn’t just the concise, confident blows, it was the sequence. The pro called, left a message, and sent an email—all in rapid succession. When he left a voice mail on a cell phone, he would also text. Then he would do this again, again, again, and again. By the fifth COMBO, there would be a response. Sacré bleu—impossible!

You can succeed at prospecting if you are consistent and concise and use triples—techniques honed to perfection. Simplicity can be like a laser. Call, voice mail, email. Send emails right out of the CRM so you don’t even have to log it. Know the one message that is needed. Land punches at the C-level and never falter. It works in big and small companies. Those who followed the pro’s lead won. He was the millionaire next door, now a VP of Sales. This could be you!

So it was upon observation of his behavior, along with the similar behavior of others, that I developed the core technique called COMBO—and it’s lightning in a bottle! It’s this simple. Pick some people who can actually buy. Call them. Leave them a message with why they should talk to you (do not talk about your company or products). Immediately email them referencing the message. That’s it.

COMBO triple: Once again, this is the core of call, email, and voice mail (in under two minutes).

COMBO quads, quints, and sextets (not to be confused with sexting): Just add other channels such as text message, Twitter DM, and LinkedIn.

COMBO custom: I’d call a video mail a super groundbreaking thing. I’d call adding a prospect on Facebook pretty out-of-the-box and dicey.

Virgil said, “Fortune favors the bold.” There are many combinations a savvy seller could construct away from the core. If you think about how a fighter gets good, they hit a bag for 10,000 hours and pull heavy things through the snow. Repetition is the mother of skill, but the bursting effect of pattern interruption is what makes any technique lethal.

For the prospect, shortly after the phone stops ringing, a message light flashes or they receive a voice mail alert. Then they instantly receive an email, a text, and a notification in Twitter; when they open LinkedIn, there is a message from you. I think you could wake the dead with this strategy, and believe me, some C-level executives definitely remind me of the Crypt Keeper.

COMBO is not about multitasking. Instead, it requires dedicated focus. I honestly think it’s fairly controversial to say this, but if you believe in science you shouldn’t multitask at all. Efficient multitasking is a myth. The brain cannot do it; it’s been proven. The female brain has the best shot, but the reason so few men die in their sleep is because the male brain definitely can’t do two things at once. You might as well do one thing correctly and move on to the next rather than try to do two things poorly and have to do them again or, worse still, botch the engagement with an important person.

Social media takes your brain off your failures as you either admire artificially perfect profiles or simply judge others. The ability to check out mentally is a real detriment to work effectiveness. Your life isn’t virtual; it’s happening right now all around you. Carpe diem—seize this moment! Be willing to be uncomfortable and actually live your own life by embracing physical reality and the phone.

If you’re spending the entire day on social networks, you’re just not selling. Develop normal old-fashioned social skills, and interact with people. Remember, not everyone wants to be researched profusely, as it can be off-putting and creepy. If you absolutely have no need for a yacht, will getting a referral from your college buddy and realizing this seller researched your entire family tree really sway you? No compelling event, no trigger, no need.

Caveat emptor: Here are some tips to safely use the LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook platforms, which make a bazillion dollars serving ads to you: It’s not necessarily helpful to be on social networks while working. It can be mesmerizing, and you’re being paid to work, not socialize. If you were paying yourself, would you be happy with the lackadaisical way you’re spending your billable hours? If your laptop screen were being broadcast in Times Square, what would you click on then? I would even argue that some flagrant uses of social media at work are a blatant time theft!

The argument for using these platforms during your day is that they can drive business success. To frame how crazy social can be, imagine if I encouraged you to watch a dozen concurrent sports games while doing discovery calls. Now imagine how many successful real-world touches you could achieve making a list of high-value prospects and then turning everything off, including your computer. You need to be focused on what you’re doing. There’s a rhythm to getting in the zone, a positive force that builds when you do a singular activity. It’s called flow in positive psychology.

Effectively setting one to three qualified appointments with high-value prospects is more potent than a week of getting top executives to add you on social media and like your content. Even if you did get these likes, it’s typically their executive assistant just powering their LinkedIn profile anyway. Why? CEOs are rarely on social media. They’re doing business deals, which is why you can’t get ahold of them.

Think of this as working out. If you’re lifting a ton of weights and then eat a piece of cake, you’re going to stumble. Social media is the Twinkie of life. You know you need to do the heavy lifting. If you delude yourself, you’re not going to be successful. After work hours, go do whatever you want. What happens in Vegas ironically now lives on forever on social media, but I digress. It’s probably healthier to allow your brain to relax. Are you allowing yourself to generally reset or are you half doing your life? Go exercise so the endorphins flow, and then get some high-quality sleep. Practice self-care. Wouldn’t it be best to go 100 percent at work, and then have a hobby after hours? Or would you rather live your life halfway every waking hour of your day? I would personally rather interact with someone who is fully present.

In my first book, I set a cornerstone of full presence with my RSVPselling methodology, which manages large, complex deals already in play. I’ll admit, I fall prey to time-wasters like everyone else, but it’s important to spend as much time as possible proactively touching qualified prospects as much as you can during the business day. It’s more fun to research your way down a deep rabbit hole, but remember to prioritize the phone over any other channel because you’re going to resist it the most. You’re human and don’t want to be rejected.

We live in strange days where multitasking has reached epidemic proportions. Sales floors have become as quiet as churches and public libraries. So what should you do instead? Dead simple: Furiously protect your revenue-generating activities and selling time. Then go and actually drive the activities that create sales. Do research and make lists in off hours. Hit those lists whether you’re in the field, in the office, or working from home. Do what you fear and hate the most, first thing in the morning before everyone’s day goes out the window . . . call!

By doing that one thing you will double or triple outcomes because 25 calls turn into 50, which turn into 75. Never reaching prospects turns into setting multiple appointments. Consistency, persistency, and work ethic are not to be confused with massive amounts of social media. Many people want to eat candy all day, guzzle sugar drinks, and never brush their teeth. They haven’t the foggiest idea why their teeth keep falling out. Catch my drift? If you’re a manager reading this, get out from behind the computer and get out into the field to do deal reviews. Get into the fresh air to visit with clients and coach your people before and after key meetings so they can become better.

Be Your Own Sales Development Rep (SDR)

I fully respect SDRs, aka inside sales reps (ISRs) or lead development reps (LDRs), to the point of having a crush. They can use this book and become business development managers (BDMs) or account executives (AEs) and champions of new business sales in any company. We’ve all been influenced by “predictable revenue” with the concept that still works in many businesses where the Henry Ford model of selling is adopted and hunters abandon the idea that they should open and set meetings. The problem with the compartmentalization of sales is that it usually results in fewer people prospecting, and that’s not healthy for any business because everyone needs to be opening opportunities and obtaining referrals.

Senior salespeople need to be their own SDRs, and here’s why. If you have a multimillion-dollar quota, you’re not going to be successful relying on someone junior to get you appointments with C-level executives. This is because they’re bunkered behind a steel wall guarded by an impenetrable EA trained like a Doberman to eat not only the raw steak, but also your ego. The EA’s main purpose in life is to prevent you from visiting the boss. No amount of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) being qualified to sales qualified leads (SQLs) is going to be enough for a senior salesperson to make their highly ambitious targets. This is especially true when the lunatic people at the top relentlessly halve your territory and uplift your quota by 30 percent.

Treat MQLs from the marketing folks and SQLs from SDRs as a bonus. Take control of your own success! If you have a finite list of target accounts that are highly matrixed, you’ll need to be very surgical about how you multi-thread across multiple levels in a waterfall effect—this is the art of saturation. Military strategy comes into play as you try to flank, land and expand, change the rules, and eat the elephant. You’ll risk the customer’s entire IT organization or marketing team shutting you down, blocking your email address, or asking your company to stop calling. You may be asked to go fill out their vendor inquiry form on some website that is essentially a black hole. But that’s more than okay because you gotta go poke the bear if you want to be truly successful.

I’ve watched the patterns of SDRs, and that’s how I learned that even in the most well-respected companies, they get shut down when they try to set meetings with senior people. It’s not because they lack skills or commitment. I also learned from SDRs the technique of screen-shotting a LinkedIn InMail and sending it as an email—simply brilliant. I saw them leverage things like SalesLoft Cadence to track and manage how frequently they contacted a prospect. Being able to carry the right narrative with gravitas is no mean feat. If you have a serious number to hit, you must own pipeline building as well as selling and closing.

You need to carve out a minimum of two hours per day to do COMBO Prospecting in a rock-solid prospecting block. The best time to do this is first thing in the morning once you’ve had a couple of cups of java but before your prospects have disappeared into their day.

Take a sheet of paper, fold it in half, and literally leave hatch marks for how many triples you’ve made in less than two minutes. A manual tracking mechanism rather than CRM is a critical component of success with this method. Ensuring that you are not multitasking in any way is crucial. That means locking a door, reserving a cubicle, or even calling from home if you’re a remote operator out there in the field. Some salespeople have had to fight for approval to even make prospecting calls in a world gone socially crazy. A sales floor of churchlike silence is a scourge, a cancer in business. The boisterous chatter of salespeople connecting live with prospects and leaving voice messages is what should be regarded as sacrosanct.

Chris Beall came across a sales technology company in Silicon Valley that had two SDRs who were forbidden by the VP of Sales from making outbound prospecting calls! The rationale was that interrupting people is rude. Chris was shocked and so was I. Mark Hunter once wrote to me recounting another true story of an inside sales manager being told to remove the gong on the sales floor. Each time one of his team members made a sale they got to ring the gong, but HR instructed him to remove it because another sales manager said it was too noisy for his team. Mark’s advice to HR: fire the other sales manager who complained. His advice to the CEO: fire HR!

Time-blocking is nothing new. University students do it, athletes do it, Arnie did it to become Mr. Universe. Effective time management and focus will get you where you need to be, which is 3X pipeline within a couple of quarters as a way to exceed your quota.

Now here’s the kicker to being your own SDR. From the moment of reading this, you must become an SDR every day—forever. I know, that’s a daunting task, and you really want to climb the ladder to SVP of Sales or even CEO someday. But the trickiest thing about leading in sales is that action bias reigns supreme. You can’t be the heavyweight champion of the world and then never step into the ring again. It’s like ancient tribes where the strongest warrior is also the leader of the pack. The strongest COMBO prospector is the leader of the company, and after reading many successful CEO interviews, I found that they are hustling the hardest. Even board members need to help generate revenue with their relationships.

Think of outbound calls like showering with caffeine soap, eating raw meat, or shaving with Crocodile Dundee’s knife. You must do it every day to maintain hygiene, let alone keep up momentum. If you travel, make calls in airports. You can’t ever miss a day. You can’t ever delegate this core responsibility. The irony of the effective sales leader is that they wear every hat and still manage their time effectively. Sure, let your SDRs contribute and train them assiduously in these methods, but never for a second think you can let up on these daily COMBOs yourself. You must keep slogging, hitting the bag, and drilling into a finite list of 50 accounts, with six to eight contacts per account, until you hear that magical word, “no.” Then cycle that prospect 90 to 180 days later. Calling is the top skill you should be developing to gain an edge, not just for prospecting and landing meetings with C-level decision-makers, but at every stage of the funnel.

Social selling is an epidemic. But it’s not social to hide behind your computer, Neo. Reach out and touch someone! There’s no doubt LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most addictive, mind-numbingly fascinating voyeuristic paradises ever constructed since The Matrix. That being the case, I go into world-renowned technology companies to advise on new sales and can’t help but witness the chilling silence. Digitally native millennials have embraced the digital-only approach while rocking to Spotify in their earbuds full blast, and lazy managers have also drunk the social selling–only Kool-Aid. I was interviewed on a London show in 2017, and the host told me that one of their clients had removed phones altogether from the sales floor, having gone “full bottle” on social. I was aghast and simply said, “That’s insane.”

Cell phone penetration will exceed world population. Multiple devices per human is coming, and with the Internet of Things (IOT), there will be 25 digital ways to reach a prospect—even through their refrigerator. Wouldn’t you rather be the signal in all that meaningless noise? How can you miss communicating with an “always on” medium that’s physically on every person? Within 10 years, one-third of the B2B global salesforce will be made obsolete by AI. Gerhard Gschwandtner made one of the boldest predictions about all sales being gone by a “not too distant future date,” and we’re seeing all sorts of doomsday prophecies emanating from the Gartners and Forresters of the world. Rest assured, trusted advisers are built to last and will not be affected. Conversely, they’ll most likely be more in demand than ever.

Human beings lack discipline, and the fact that people check phones hundreds of times a day proves this flaw has never been more acute. If you can harness this and be excellent at interrupting prospects effectively out of the blue, you will always work. If you can do this at “sick levels of massive action,” á la Grant Cardone, nobody who cares about Revenue with a capital R at your company will ever forget your full name (including middle) or let you leave the building to go to a competitor.

The best SVPs and GMs of Sales I’ve ever seen still pound the phone every day, leading with massive action from the front. Yes, don’t you see this? Aren’t your CEO and CFO always talking about that networking event where they saw the prospect CEO and they’re going to make a warm introduction? When I personally met Mark Hawkins, the CFO of Salesforce, in the green room when we were both speaking at an event, I was impressed. When I heard him on stage in front of thousands, he blew me away with his sales and marketing savvy—all my accountant jokes were immediately redundant.

The masters of the universe are doing cold calls face-to-face all day. How about Zuckerberg and Parker raising the initial funding round for Facebook (an insane Matrix-like idea in its time) by going and cold-calling the office of Peter Thiel (of PayPal fame)? They got to the top of sales and entrepreneurship, then moved into the corner office as CEOs before matriculating to board members. They did it all with a philosophy of “let’s take action and take no prisoners.”

Artificial intelligence cannot make jokes, shoot the breeze, kibitz, and relate. Until AI has EQ, you will keep your job if you can create enough value to fund your role. The rapport step is everything. You can’t respectfully Challenge or SPIN a person who dislikes you. You can’t make someone like you because you comment on their white-water rafting photo above the desk. It’s certainly off-putting when you stalk them on Facebook and let them know you’ll be at the football game the same Saturday afternoon. There is no inflection in text mediums, so again the neuroscience-backed power of tone in the human voice is transcendent. This is why a simple call and voice mail slaughters 2030 level sales AI. It’s elementary, my dear Watson!

Pre-revenue KPIs will protect you. If you are personally building 3X pipeline at a rapid rate while all the other snoozers are sitting with feet up on the desk swiping their Tinder, they are getting kicked off the island first. This means intelligently being on the phone. Chris Beall has listened to tens of thousands of sales conversations and classifies the way salespeople sound. He says there are three types: sincere/competent/confident (2 percent), the salesman (49 percent), and the deer in the headlights (49 percent).¹

Chris tells the story of listening to John Legend singing some intentionally mundane lines about washing a sweater, and his voice makes it sound sexy, compelling, and memorable. “The voice speaks before the words are uttered, and I very rarely come across a rep who practices what they sound like. They don’t sing—they bark, grunt, slur, chatter, fumble, or worse, they go for smooth because that worked on a girl in the 10th grade. If I could teach reps one thing it would be to “sing” like John Legend—not smooth, just pure and confident and competent sounding. Because buyers aren’t looking—they are, unconsciously and brilliantly, listening for who they can trust.”²

Being your own SDR and giving good phone builds confidence in every sphere of your life. You lose the awkward silences. It’s therapeutic and life transforming to put yourself out there and become forged in the fires of rejection and the pressure to deliver results. You’ll be a diamond, secure from within and admired by all those who matter in your career. Like Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire and in person on Oprah, you’ll jump on the couch radiating an aura of stupid-grin cool! People love to be around confident people; it sets them at ease emotionally. Calm executives like to buy things when they can open up their vulnerabilities and lower the veil. You will become as Abraham Maslow and Dr. Wayne Dyer opined: “Independent of the good opinion of others.” That life state is self-actualized and near invincible for a seller or professional of any ilk.

It’s unpopular to be a sanitation engineer, but plumbers can make a glorious living just going through the motions, and they don’t give a crap about what people think. Sellers may not be held in the same regard as surgeons, but they can drive the same sports car and give their families similar life experiences. Plumbers don’t like putting their hands up a sewer pipe just like nobody wants to do cold-calling, but they just embrace the task because it’s what generates the results. Use warm techniques to never truly cold-call anyway. You’ll soon be coaching the SDRs and have the CEO knocking on your cubicle. Trust me, I smell a promotion.

Shocking Paradoxes That Govern Prospecting

The average salesperson only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.³ Eighty percent of sales require five follow-ups⁴ yet 44 percent of salespeople give up after one follow-up.⁵

Mid-funnel and bottom-funnel closing depends entirely on prospecting skills. “If you can’t gain the first commitment,” as Anthony Iannarino says, “you’re never going to gain subsequent commitments.” Sales can be one of the most rewarding jobs in the world when you do it right, and it can be the brutally hardest when you fumble around in the dark.

My first book talked about finding your true North Star and the compass that guides you there being integrity of purpose. Tolkien summed it up best when he said: “Not all those who wander are lost.” The most direct path is not always the best option, and the best sellers embrace the counterintuitive, sometimes contradictory wisdom in navigating the people and politics of the complex sale. Consider the following sales advice:

“To be consultative, be assumptive.”⁶ You don’t need to put yourself on a parity or equal playing field with powerful people. There’s seldom been a deal for six or seven figures that wasn’t between an average-paid rep and a titan in a corporation. Don’t let it bruise your ego that you are not as powerful as the decision-maker. In their eyes, you being an expert in your technology, products, and services makes them admire and respect you as a trusted adviser. Sell with gravitas, assume the sale, and concentrate on what comes after the close. This is when they realize the benefits and embrace the win-win relationship that results from successful partnership.

There are 6.8 decision-makers in the buying committee,⁷ but you don’t need to close all of them to get a sale. The truth is, there is still one alpha sleigh dog, and she has the best view. Start very high with compelling insight to the bottom line and with a jargon-free value narrative, then let that player validate and vet you and give you the keys to the kingdom. Remember, there are so many people in a matrixed organization that only have the power of “no,” not “yes”!

Strategic planning and sharpening the axe for hours, days, or weeks does not allow you to cut the tree down faster. The great oddity of prospecting effectively is that a quick message in a blended set of channels will cut through and get you a meeting with your dream prospects worlds faster than obsessing over writing an email for hours.

The most powerful people in the world want to engage with you only on the basis that you provide them with value and are worthy of trust in their eyes.

Persistence and COMBOs are not just required lower in the funnel. Don’t ever let up, keep delivering blows until you have closed mid-funnel and especially in procurement. You should be calling and emailing back and forth daily just before final signature.

You’ll achieve higher response with a blended channel than a better message. This means that a B-grade message delivered live on a phone call or left on a voice mail, then sent in an email or text in some omni-channel combination, will actually outperform the A+ message that is sent in only one channel, especially email. This one’s easy to explain. CXOs are simply overloaded, so they don’t check unsolicited emails of any kind. You could have the location of the Holy Grail or a winning lottery ticket, and they’d simply ignore it, or more likely, their executive assistant would be there blocking you.

More personalized outreach does not bring about a higher conversion rate. Oddly, personalization often looks needy and repels. What to do: Laser focus with research based on business value and get straight to the point.

You do not need to vary the message for each person to achieve cut-through. Mike Scher studied 1.4 million sales interactions and found that top-down strategies with identical messaging work better than changing the message each time. This is because it rattles the cage or tree and creates confusion, so everyone forwards it around, smoking out the actual buying committee. This is much like pouring smoke into an ant farm or beehive. CEB talks about this in The Challenger Customer. The more you challenge each stakeholder on the merits of your solution by reframing the problem, the more they each cement in a unique position. Then when they go to form a consensus, it’s just gridlock and dysfunction.

Consider not varying your message much at all. Organizations are like waterfalls, and water moves down the chain of command; the underlings are always managing up so as not to be fired. When you send a powerful value message to one senior leader and neglect her colleague, they’ll forward it to that colleague. If you send the same message to four people, they all compare notes, and suddenly it feels like the whole organization is talking about your unknown start-up by the watercooler.

My clients have experimented with sending thousands of emails into big companies, and they found several bizarre ways to create engagement:

Start your outreach to someone with a single word related to revenue or ideas.

Use “Your LinkedIn Profile” as a subject line. For some reason this gets astounding response rates.

As explained above, if you write the exact same message to the C-level, SVP or VP, lateral VP, and operations folks, it cuts through better than tailoring each message.

Be extremely assumptive in all communication by writing as if meeting with you is a given. Eliminate waffling words such as maybe, perhaps, or with your permission.

Sales is blocking and tackling, punting and kicking, rucking and mauling. There are many channels to leverage and pros and cons for all. I’d love to tell you that crafting a personalized, relevant, tailored message to every stakeholder will spark a consensus, but it won’t. The more you challenge each individual stakeholder, the more individual ossification and peer dysfunction will grow, until you’re knee deep in the boggy morass of the status quo.

The reason I share all this is the most basic sales paradox of all: You don’t have all the answers, you are often lost, or maybe you fell into your profession. Yet your job is to be the guide and shepherd of the world’s largest customers. There are approximately 3 million global sellers who have to service, in many cases, just 1,000 global accounts with the highest revenues. Breaking through requires different levels of thinking and disciplined execution of innovative methods.

Time-Blocking—Discipline Within the Hours

Discipline beats motivation every time. Who cares whether you feel like doing it? I brush my teeth morning and night whether I feel like it or not. Dedicate two hours every day to 30 triples: 30 calls, voice mails, and emails (feel free to add text message and InMail). The idea is that you do 30 COMBO touches (triples at a minimum) to your prospects in key target accounts per day. At a minimum, that’s five accounts, six contacts in each, with two to three being C-level decision-makers, VP and up.

Apportion your workday according to Mike Weinberg’s 33/33/33 rule. Once you’ve built your pipeline, you spend a third of your time in top, middle, and bottom.

Then apply the Single Lever Rule—focus on the one thing that scares you the most, and knock that out first. The truth is that showing up to work and just reactively answering email to get to in-box zero is probably the biggest waste of time in the history of mankind. Jeb Blount calls the work hours the golden hours and the outside of work hours the platinum hours. The point is that moving the needle on revenue is a Sisyphean task if you’re moving the wrong levers. The Single Lever Rule is to find that one key lever that moves your day forward to any key performance indicator (KPI) you need to drive.

If you’re looking to break into new accounts and have those crucial conversations that matter, it may be a certain type of call or outreach with a certain method done a certain amount of times. What we do know for sure from Jason Jordan’s work in Cracking the Sales Management Code is that revenue is a lagging indicator. Merely looking at it cannot influence it. You need to back into all the smart activities that lead from an action, to an objective, to an ultimate result.

Trigger Events and Social Listening

We’ve discussed the power of trigger events throughout this book, and they are massively important for pipeline generation. At any given time, only 3 percent of your market is actively buying. Fifty-six percent is not ready, and 41 percent is poised to begin.⁸ The most powerful trigger event is a job change, where someone has switched companies or been promoted. In this case, you can’t sell on features or a solution anymore; you must go to the next level and be a political seller. This means thinking consistently about making your customer a hero and helping them advance politically within their organization. According to Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto in their book Shift! the other two triggers are “awareness” (news, events or press coverage, etc.) and “bad suppliers” (competitors stumbling in the market or dropping the ball with the client). LinkedIn Sales Navigator along with RainKing, DiscoverOrg, and Cognism even have “scoops” that give you real-time actionable business intel on prospects and triggers. Funding is a powerful trigger, so CrunchBase should be monitored daily for funding rounds and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) that could make a prospect suddenly flush with cash. Configure Google Alerts, and don’t be afraid to brazenly mention relevant news in your candid outreach. Marketing software or technology upgrades are immediate ways to deploy funds to fuel profitable revenue growth for potential clients.

Monitor for events that trigger awareness or need within your market and with specific potential customers. Also, identify the best way to automate the monitoring and listening. Social platforms are not for narcissistic blasting but instead for social listening! Follow key people, companies, and Twitter hashtags. Triggers give you context for outreach and a reason to call. Trigger events and referrals are hugely important because they provide you with the highest probability of engagement and the fastest path to a sale.

Referrals—The Path of Highest Probability

Referrals create a head start with trust, a prerequisite in any sale, and buyers are five times more likely to engage with a salesperson when there is a trusted common connection and warm introduction.⁹ Programmatically leveraging warm personal introductions and referrals, both internal and external, is an intelligent way to build sales pipeline. When I say programmatic, I mean that you invest time specifically focused on doing this each week, ideally every day. Here’s why you must make it a priority. Referrals are 69 percent faster to close, referrals convert to revenue at a higher rate than any other lead source, and referred clients have a higher lifetime value.¹⁰

According to Joanne Black, America’s leading authority on referral selling, a referral enables you to secure a meeting with just one call because you open with immediate credibility and context. She makes the valid point that the sales process shortens and the cost of sale plummets. Joanne’s own surveys with clients, conducted over two decades, reveal that competition diminishes greatly with referral selling and conversion rates increase to be greater than 50 percent!¹¹

The smartest and most successful salespeople embrace referral selling. Here are more compelling statistics: A referred customer provides 25 percent higher profit margins, is 18 percent less likely to leave, and provides a lifetime value 16 percent higher than a nonreferred customer.¹² Eighty-four percent of decision-makers begin their buying process with a referral.¹³ Ninety-two percent of consumers trust referrals from people they know and are four times more likely to buy when referred by someone they know and trust.¹⁴ Seventy-three percent of buyers prefer to work with a salesperson referred by a trusted common connection.¹⁵ Eighty-four percent of executives grant a meeting to a salesperson who is recommended internally.¹⁶

LinkedIn allows you to immediately see connections in common by first or second degree. Who do you know who knows someone in the account? You can easily just filter connections in common and click under the profiles to surface patterns and themes. Typically, you’ll start to see some of the same super-connectors or nodes showing up over and over again as you’re prospecting into a specific industry vertical.

I’m a huge proponent of making a phone call to the connection in common and being willing to ghostwrite the warm introduction. Send them a paragraph on why the intro matters, and write it from their viewpoint to make it easier for them to introduce you. These warm referrals convert at an astoundingly higher rate than a direct selling approach.

A powerful channel is alumni, even if you don’t have any connections in common. Common jobs or schools are a huge point of empathy and connectivity. I’ve seen amazing doors get opened by sharing a story about the school you have in common. Sports teams in common also convert well. But beware too much personalized communication because it can be seen as a “used car salesman” approach, or overly needy and hungry.

There are those who purport to generate all of their business with pure referrals, but the reality of modern selling is that it’s a world of named accounts or defined territories. Aggressive sales targets mean that no one can make their sales number on referrals alone. Nor can they make their number from inbound leads, SDRs, and outsourced demand generation providers. All of these tools must be used to achieve the best outcomes.

Here is how to drive your own targeted referrals: Take each key account, look in the How You’re Connected panel in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and mine your first- and second-degree connectivity. Identify those you actually know within your social network who can make a personal introduction to anyone in that prospective account. Any first-degree connectivity at any echelon will get you light-years into the account. It’s a Trojan horse. Even if you went to school with someone in their HR department or on the sales team, it’s still worlds warmer than an unsolicited cold call. Inside coaching and intelligence is gold.

You may be in a big enough company to have Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition, which shows with the TeamLink feature whether anyone in your entire company overlaps into the prospect base. It’s even better if the connection is an engineer. Imagine the credibility of your VP of IT having worked with someone at the prospect company. What if your entire C-suite was thinking this way? What if you institutionalized the process of looking for common connections between your entire company and the most coveted dream accounts?

They key to referrals is simply being in the habit of asking! If you’ve completed a project for a client, you can say: “Hey John, I really enjoyed working with your team on that project! The feedback on the job we’ve done has been great. Whom else in the company should I be talking to?” If you’ve built a good relationship in one area of the client’s business, you can say: “Hey Mary, what’s going on inside the business where we could potentially help, and whom should I be speaking with?”

There are hundreds of ways of asking, but so few do it. You see what you are looking for, and every happy customer should be seen as a source of referrals, internally within their organization and externally within their extended network. Be in the habit of asking.

Advanced Technique Playbook

I’ve touched on how to use technology throughout this book to break through, but let’s go deeper with how to interweave technology and platforms into your COMBO strategy. First, these are the possible types of social platforms relevant in business-to-business sales:

Personal social: You should be open to adding prospects on Facebook and then messaging them. Weird, awkward, controversial? Yes, and don’t invade their personal life, but Facebook is an integral part of the social graph.

Picture-based social: Instagram and Pinterest are winners here, and this is the interest graph.

Professional social: LinkedIn is the giant gorilla, and it combines the social graph and interest graph with the economic graph.

Messaging social: Twitter is super powerful for monitoring triggers and understanding what interests the people you seek to meet. It’s also a powerful notification engine, and direct messaging in Twitter or a phone text message can achieve amazing response rates.

The most powerful platform of all for B2B sellers is LinkedIn Sales Navigator coupled with CRM and marketing automation such as the Salesforce suite. Use Sales Navigator for creating sales funnel and CRM with integrated marketing automation for every account and contact that shows any sign of life. Here is my approach for leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

Step 1: Take an account list of no greater than 50 accounts, and add it on Sales Navigator.

Step 2: Save five to seven prospects per account as leads because you are going to monitor the content they share and where they are mentioned plus interact with this content.

Step 3: Build a robust Sales Navigator feed that you’ll utilize in both web and mobile streams. This is a Custom Feed.

Step 4: Here’s the kicker. Sort by Lead Shares, and start to comment on what they’re sharing in a thoughtful way. Remember, you’re not connected to these people, so it’s a wow factor for CXOs to have some total stranger commenting in a relevant way out of the blue! Contacts that share based on the 90, 9, and 1 Internet theory of presumption are massively valuable. Basically, only 1 percent write, 9 percent share, and the other 90 percent are really more voyeurs on the web.¹⁷ If someone is sharing, call them. Use a service like Data. com, ZoomInfo, DiscoverOrg, Lusha or RainKing to directly call them and intelligently comment (with context and relevance) on what they’ve shared on social (as evidenced by Navigator).

Step 5: You need to set aside time to mine your potential referrals per account. Your goal is to call colleagues who are connected into prospect companies. All of these connections should be exploited so you never cold-call again. If you sell software to CMOs, you can still leverage a connection to the HR or legal department. All connections are golden, and these weak ties between your company and the prospect organization are powerful for intelligence and coaching.

Step 6: Set aside time to explore all your first- and second-degree referral sources into prospect organizations. These are represented in Navigator, and you can click to expand them and look for patterns that emerge in the common connections. This will reveal competitive salespeople in other vendor companies or nodes on the network. Nodes can be industry thought leaders or well-connected influencers. Mapping the connections to the power base is a heat-seeking-missile way to reach the right decision-maker.

Call up sellers in affiliated vendors that are harmonious to what you sell, and cohost networking events with them to overlap your networks. The cardinal rule of referral selling on LinkedIn is not to do it digitally. When you identify the connection in common, call that connection and offer to ghostwrite a message they can pass along to make the warm introduction. Make it frictionless. B2B buyers are five times more likely to engage when the outreach is through a mutual connection.¹⁸

Step 7: Watch the daily email digest from Navigator for job changes. When you are going after a calling list, start to call down the Navigator Newsfeed, which shows news mentions, job changes, lead recommendations, and other triggers like funding or innovation projects. Use the Navigator real-time feed as the bedrock for your triples. You’ll remember the basis of COMBO is a call, voice mail, and email—back-to-back and in less than two minutes. Jab, jab, jab!

Step 8: Don’t exceed 50 target accounts and up to seven contacts per account. This means you should only ever be monitoring 300 objects, which is double the Dunbar number of 150. The neocortex can hold only 150 connections. Sales Navigator actually gets unwieldy, and you start to miss information if you follow too many people or accounts. Even if you change your stream by sorting by “recent” instead of “most important,” it’s cumbersome. You should have 50 key target accounts per quarter max, five to seven leads per prospect, and at least one C-level per account. Remember, you can easily purge out accounts and leads if you track too many. Work clean and keep it organized and tight. Move the contacts into CRM, and leverage LinkedIn integration with CRM market leaders such as Salesforce and Microsoft.

There are a bunch of platforms like SalesLoft and Groove to keep your blended prospecting touches consistent. Build a simple Excel or Google spreadsheet with your top 50 account names, stack rank them as 1, 2, or 3 for hot, warm, or cold. Put a column next to them for VITO (Very Important Top Officers) and then a column for the additional decision-makers. Then add a column for strategy and notes. As your main column to the left of every name and the rank, add Last Contacted. When you’re doing a two-hour or three-hour COMBO block, you want to cycle through at least 3 triples on 10 accounts for 30 triples in total. Keep track of every account you covered that day. If at all possible, do all of this in your CRM or dialing software platform.

If you’ve got a list of 50, you can cycle through the entire list this way each week or every other week. Basically, you can start to cover all the contacts in all 50 accounts five to seven times in a two- to three-month period over the course of a quarter. This thoroughness is how the breakthrough comes, and it’s okay if there are no signs of life on the first call, voice mail, or email. You can track opens by device type and geographically via Cirrus Insight, ToutApp, or YesWare.

Pull each key account in Navigator and see the leads attributed. Read their profile and check their activity stream to understand relevant context. Reading their profile is not enough. Find a common connection who can introduce you, and by all means Google their name before contacting them and hit the News button to pull memorable quotes. Tie this back to your product or services. You’d think this advice is Sales 101, but so few SDRs, AEs, or BDMs actually do the 30 seconds of research, which can increase engagement. I would recommend putting a + sign in the subject line and combining things that seem random like: University of Michigan + fly fishing. Business context is best, but think outside the box.

“From an email perspective, we normally hit a 12 percent open rate off a cold list, which is exceptionally good. With LinkedIn InMail, we hit 48 percent open rate. We have never seen open rates like this for a long time,”¹⁹ says Brett Chester, vice president of online marketing and demand generation at Replicon. Don’t let people tell you that InMail is spam or a waste of time—it’s a vitally important channel for your COMBO outreach. Exhaust all of your InMails every month no matter what; even a disinterested response gives you a credit back on the InMail counter.

Nobody ever calls presidents, CEOs, or board members. You should call VCs who back the companies if you are going after earlier-stage ventures. Where do you get the phone number? Many times, by simply becoming a first-degree connection (always write a customized LinkedIn request)—their phone number will be freely available on their profile in the Contact area. Otherwise, Lusha, RainKing, DiscoverOrg, ZoomInfo, Inside View, Avention, Data.com, and others can provide this seamlessly. Subscribe—it’s essential for your success.

I talk to CXOs, and they say they get very little InMail compared with email. They get one phone call or voice mail compared with 500+ emails. Stop—read that again. What does this tell you? It’s not even the quality of a cold call, voice mail, or InMail—it’s just doing it at all that makes the lion’s share of the difference. This massive uplift in action alone completely stands out in the all-digital social selling cacophony. Pretty much everyone I add now (and I’ve tested this) immediately spams me back selling products or services. Social selling fail! No value is being created. The vast majority of sellers are lazily only emailing and adding without a custom invite, only to immediately send spam (once). No follow-up. The golden secret of sales, Grant Cardone will tell you, is: “Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up!”

The relevancy paradox is the idea that adding value and changing up the message every time will yield a better result than never varying. The problem is that it can make you look needy. Over-researching can cripple an outreach campaign. You’ve developed your scripts and a hypothesis of value for their industry, so just create some relevance in the preamble. Don’t overthink it and go into analysis paralysis. Get on the blower and set the appointment!

But for this to work, you need a relevant target who is similar to existing prospects or who leverages a direct competitor’s solution. They’ve bought before; they get it. Some percentage will be dissatisfied and buy again. Be there when the buying cycle is embryonic, and capture them into your CRM for lead nurturing and insight content marketing campaigns. Provide value in the education phase, but move fast and identify prospects who will soon enter the buying phase. Your pipeline must have nice shape and balance; it must be strategic and tactical, short-term and long-term, with some rats and mice plus some elephants or whales.

Seeking to engage based on work anniversaries or birthdays is pretty spammy. Congratulating people incessantly on a new role, funding, or a school in common is wildly overplayed. One senior executive with whom I have a good relationship told me he updated his LinkedIn profile to “looking for new opportunities” after he was let go. He received 17 InMails congratulating him on the new role. He had been unfairly pushed out after nearly two decades of excellent leadership performance and service. I laughed, he went silent. I apologized, and then he laughed, too.

The best messaging is focused on the results you provide for a similar company, and quantifying this with hard dollars is best. It’s really that simple and cut-and-dried. The Cialdini concept of social proof is very powerful. If you talk to the CMO of Pepsi about something you’re doing for Coke, you’ll get a callback. It’s fiercely competitive to innovate at the top, but be careful about divulging your customer’s competitive IP because you’ll have a personal integrity issue if you do, and you can destroy trust before you begin. They’ll simply suck you dry of information and spit you out into the reception area.

I’ve tested every type of messaging under the sun and found that repetition is the key. Sending a very similar message to the top of the food chain and down through the ranks, only slightly varying it if at all, as you blitz triples every 72 hours will get your emails circulated. Some call this “the art of confusion.” Don’t be linear in your approach because it’s too slow, and someone will inevitably seek to block you from talking with others. Go after the 13 people who are relevant in the account, all at the same time! Obsessively focus on the chief executive office and the company’s internal and even external customers. You need to both push and pull in your strategy.

I’d be remiss not to mention the mid-funnel practice of multi-threading contacts as well as communication avenues. Remember there are now almost seven stakeholders in every buying committee in a complex sale according to CEB, so if you’re single-threaded you’re “deaded”! Okay, it rhymes. But take the time midstream, once you’ve opened the opportunity, to get connectivity with your contact’s boss, lateral VPs, and operational players. These are the victims of the problem, aka the users of the solution. This is priceless for mobilizing consensus, and it increases close rates and accelerates deals.

Insider Secrets of Savvy Sellers

As you create your own strategy utilizing a tailored playbook, technology stack, templates, and processes, recognize that the devil is in the details, or perhaps it’s the angel depending on how you look at it. Here are 13 nuances to give you the inside track:

1. Referrals and warm introductions are exponentially more powerful than any other channel. So the first step in pursuing any account is to study connections in common and actually reach out to those people to ask how strong their connection is and if they can help you. Connecting with a prospect based on context and trust is almost magical in its power to help you outsell anyone in your company.

2. The size of your social network will determine the strength of your weak ties. Google “strength of weak ties” for background on this concept. In plain English, you are more likely to tap into more warm introductions (see point #1), and the network effects are much more powerful. Therefore, courageously cultivate a large, diverse global network of connections. You should also add everyone you ever meet, shake hands with at a networking event, or connect with at a conference. Start to harvest as many accurate email addresses and cell phone numbers you can, and build your LinkedIn profile to 5,000 first-degree connections ASAP, as this dramatically increases the likelihood of hitting quota!

3. A LinkedIn view of your profile is a lead, unless it’s a spam profile or frenemy (easy to detect). I’d controversially encourage you to always connect. It works . . . I became the most-read person on LinkedIn globally on B2B selling, and this was part of the strategy to build a following. Everyone in sales needs an extensive and powerful network.

4. Prospect organizations are pyramidal as much as they’d like to be flat and meritocratic. Therefore, it is an everlasting imperative to drive conversations at the C-suite, VP, and operational management level for any complex sale—all levels, all the time. Consensus is essential for anything to happen. Go for them all at the same time rather than at the snail’s pace approach of just one person at a time.

5. Leverage LinkedIn for social engineering or social conquesting. This is the practice of divining the exact prospects within an incumbent competitor’s installed base. Connect with thought leaders in your space, influential CMOs or SVPs of Sales of competitive vendors, when you look at your second-degree connections in Navigator. The connections in common results are ranked by some sort of propensity algorithm. Simply click under each contact in Connections in Common, and look for patterns. You’ll see the same people emerging over and over. Bingo! Unfortunately, even if you block your connections, the enemy can also see the second-degree connections of your network, but most people are ignorant of the potential here. Therefore, in ultra-competitive markets, I’d advise new business sellers not to connect by first degree on LinkedIn with prospective client leaders. Note: Generally speaking, you don’t want to open with a LinkedIn connection request, but perhaps you have a referral or strong context for doing so. Maybe you’re wanting to establish a first-degree node within the account to open up the database if you don’t have Sales Navigator.

6. Pattern interruption is why COMBO Prospecting works. The channels don’t matter as much as something unexpected that arrests the prospect’s attention. I’ve still never met a seller who’s not a beast on the phone on any continent, even in the heart of Silicon Valley. People fall into ruts or habits, so break yours by crowd-sourcing a template file of sales verbiage and tactics that are getting responses. Using the collective wisdom is the best way to create your own templates.

7. Your own venture capitalists, CEO, board members, and angel investors can accelerate deals by miles even in the current quarter. If they’re not onboard to make these intros and communicate from the top to the bottom of the organizations they back, then you have the wrong support system in place. Sit down with your CEO, and open that channel immediately.

8. Military strategy is Napoleonic when it’s constantly changing in real time. Such is guerrilla warfare. Exhaust any warm introduction you know within the target organization at any level. You’ll be shocked by the one degree of separation between a random assistant in a mail room and the CFO’s husband.

9. You have not completed prospecting a company until you receive a “no” at all the right levels. Always prospect every lead to a “no” because it is the most magical word in sales—no more false hope, no more wasted time. Let it thicken your skin. Selling is a rejection-based business, and you must become antifragile. You’d rather get a “no” decision on 50 key target accounts and close 5 to smash your quota than be wishy-washy and have happy ears, with a tidal wave of ambivalent blowback and skinny kids.

10. Conferences and networking events are filled with C-levels. Book a hotel across the street and schedule a wave of meetings there. The conference floor, exhibition hall, and parties are noise—eschew the hot wings! Private dinners at Michelin restaurants work.

11. Every sales leader should be publishing on LinkedIn, sharing use-cases, subject-matter expertise, and genuine insights. Pull prospects toward you inbound with compelling content. Set your value agenda, and proactively kill potential objections. Challenge the conventional wisdom and status quo. Brainstorm with your solutions consultant for ideas nobody’s heard before that only your solution can address.

12. Productivity is a myth. Like a keystone holds a medieval arch above the doors, massive persistent and smart activity in one key area will yield the greatest results. It is just as much about quality as it is quantity, so develop scalable systems. You as an individual are a brand, and the one thing you should always be doing is prospecting intelligently and wholeheartedly. “The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope,” says Al Ries.

13. The grass is rarely greener. I almost never see a seller leave a company for a better scenario. From one frying pan into another towering inferno they leap like Mario and Luigi. Ramp to consistent brilliant results and put a ding in the universe. President’s Club winners are seldom managers but make much more money and have infinitely better work/life balance.

The Importance of Multi-Threading

To close a significant deal, you need the line of business, IT team, stakeholders, C-suite, and procurement—it takes a village to close a deal in this modern age. You need to establish multiple bridges to span the moat into the castle. These are called threads, and the number-one reason deals don’t close is because the seller is working single-threaded or is dependent on one stakeholder. Even the most senior of people won’t sign off unless they are convinced that there is consensus for the business case and change management.

When I’m doing deal reviews, any time I notice that someone has only one contact record in the CRM, I know that the deal has a low propensity of actually closing. Go multi-thread the account is my advice. If one stakeholder says “no,” go attack the account from another angle. If the CIO says “no,” go try other IT folks lower on the food chain. Maybe this is too technical for the CIO to care about now. Maybe the CFO cares about how it’s impacting the top or bottom line. Perhaps there are friendlies in nontechnical strategic areas who will benefit from what you offer. I’ve even seen a prospector who got in through procurement itself, ensuring that his solution was on their supplier preference sheet to get shortlisted.

I typically start any pursuit campaign at the very top of the marketing or sales organization. I work with that executive’s personal assistant and ask, “What if I really wanted to set a meeting with Mrs. Big—how would I actually do it?” They always love to provide an email address from which they’ll then vet you or send your stuff to the right internal division. Do this one time, then bypass the EA even though it’s risky. I do that by sending an InMail to the C-level on a separate day.

I can’t tell you how many initial calls to the top of the org got me to an EA that pipelined me right to the Center of Excellence for my product or service. Gold calls are the ones to an EA, and they can champion you because they run that C-level’s life. Give them complete respect and the benefit of the doubt to set up a time for you.

Now if I start to get crickets from C-levels, I’ll work down the organizational chart. I always get asked what the right cadence is. Think of the organization like a pyramid, and move slower toward the top. COMBO the C-suite on a biweekly basis, maybe even bimonthly. COMBO the VP layer weekly. COMBO the operational layer or approvers every 72 hours until you get a genuine “no.” Start high and seek to get yourself sponsored down, but quickly move to driving multi-threaded outreach concurrently. Linear prospecting is for losers because each month rolls into the next as you wait and wait. Before you know it, it’s a new quarter, and then you try for the next person in the account; then the year is almost gone, and you’ve missed your sales target .  . . if you’ve survived that long. A huge piece of this method is that you’re actually trying to prospect to the “no” because nature abhors a vacuum.

COMBO hinges on concurrent multi-threading. If you do this properly, you can open 20 opportunities in 100 named accounts in a six-month period. You should pick 50 dream accounts, the logos you’d put in a trophy case, and then multi-thread COMBOs to the six to nine decision-makers in each account, going 5 to 12 touches deep.

A strategy I love is keeping a subset of the top 25 decision-makers in your book and putting them on perma-call. This means you’re going to call them around the clock without any COMBOs at all until someone picks up. When I think of an auto-magical hot-switching technology like ConnectAndSell, I think of the sheer luxury of having this done for you in real time. Thank you to the genius Chris Beall for his thought leadership in this area; interactive feedback with him definitely contributed to the solidification of ideas in this book.

Not all of you will be able to convince your boss to buy DiscoverOrg (email tracking software), have the right CRM like Salesforce, or invest in Sales Navigator. I’d require the best sales tools if I were you after diving headlong into this book. Maybe the best strategy is to buy them a copy of this book, hand it to them, and say that they need to read it because you’ll be testing them at an upcoming sales meeting on which sales tools matter the most.

If you have only a phone and a free LinkedIn and email account, you can still drive a COMBO strategy with multi-threading. Work the account pro-actively, early, up high, and across several stakeholder groups or divisions.

COMBOs to Conquer Executive ADD

Neuroscience has revealed that the average human brain can remember about 20 to 30 seconds. I think it’s more like 5 seconds. Try to remember a friend’s phone number with 9 or 10 digits. Now add the country code. Now add a 4-digit extension. It becomes near impossible once you exceed 5 seconds.

In a world where an executive has hundreds of tasks to achieve with tight budgets, and needs a full-time executive assistant who is also completely overworked, it’s unlikely you’re ever going to make it into the executive’s priority sub-list. Mike Bosworth put it plainly: “The human brain only has seven slots and so as sellers, we must fight to make it into one of them.”²⁰

Repetition alone won’t cut it. The research that says you have to have between 5 and 12 personalized touches to educate and then you will suddenly land a meeting is no longer true. Two thousand other emails were sent to that target this month, and the average is about 225 per day. This executive, or their EA, checks their in-box/phone 250 times per day, typically marking spam and clearing. No, no, no.

What I’ve isolated with COMBO is that the combinations themselves become the signal in the noise. The act of fast sequencing of blended touches sticks out because it conveys a kind of pattern-interrupt that makes the prospect think, “Wow, Jane is persistent.” In fact, it creates such a bee swarm that the prospect will sometimes seek to hire that seller rather than be perturbed at the interruption.

Why so fast on the receipt point? It’s neuroscience. Prospects are like Dory the Fish—they have short-term memory loss. You must bash in: phone rings, message alert sounds, email chimes, Twitter DM alerts. Bam-bam-bam-bam! The closer together the better. Exasperated, they may actually snap out of the malaise of midday pre-caffeine fog and, hallelujah, read your outreach.

The rule of COMBO is a universal law that is in part based on the power of the human voice. Your voice affects the COMBO just like the physical shockwave effect that happens when an adult sees a baby. Your voice must be the heart of any COMBO strategy. So it’s never a COMBO if you’re not using an H2H channel. Remember the five-second rule, and you must execute this punchy COMBO outreach in under two minutes. Ninety seconds would be ideal. Build your list the night before, and manually track your progress. Outside the hours of 9–5, there is no executive assistant blocking the executive’s phone or killing InMail messages. It’s a golden opportunity to break through first thing in the morning while they’re driving to work or having their coffee.

Another crucial set of prospecting laws for COMBO is about brevity. Email subject lines should be two to three words max and contain a + sign. The weirder the subject line, the better: Growth + Notre Dame. Revenue + Bilbo Baggins. The email body should never exceed four sentences. Remember, they’re going to check Outlook or Gmail on a smartphone. You need to show them how a similar client or competitor made or saved money. Show me the money!

You must have a powerful call to action (CTA). You can suggest two specific dates to make scheduling flawless. You can also use the Weinberg terms: visit, fit, and value. “When would be a good time to visit to see if there’s a fit for creating value for Acme Corp?”

What I’ll tell you is that to even the most blue-blooded, formal bank CXOs, colloquial English is better than looking like a robot or unsolicited drip email campaign. Design all your communication for high-level prospects to look natural, spontaneous, and massively relevant. You want your prospect to think: “Wow! If this person can be this helpful and organic, imagine the kind of trusted advice and insights she can bring if I let her onto the premises.”

Remember the vampire rule of prospecting: Once they let you in, it’s over. Being on-site dramatically increases the probability of revenue. That’s why there are less on-sites than ever. That also reminds me of the rule of interactivity: When the prospect starts to drive the deal from the front, it’s going to close. When you’re chasing shadows and trying to hound a prospect to the next step, it has an ultra-low probability of closing.

Breaking Through to CXOs and Board Members

One of the greatest hidden paths to strategically creating an opportunity is reaching out to a board member, even through social media. Respond to their tweet, engage with content they’ve published on LinkedIn, send a targeted InMail, even hook in with Facebook if there is business context.

The truth is that almost no one is trying to sell at the very top. If they want to sell HR solutions, they sell to the VP of HR. Or many others sell to the same small number of CIOs. It’s a recipe for disaster to hunt the same obvious contacts in the account. Think about the internal or external customer and how they can create pull and a compelling business case for change. You have to think chief executive officer, venture capitalists, or board members. Those people are easily revealed online and within LinkedIn.

One of the most lethal Sales Navigator techniques is to view the decision-maker themselves; maybe it’s the CMO. Once you save them as a lead against an account, look at the lead recommendations, which suggest those within the company who are similar. My estimation is that this is an algorithm that predicts who this person interfaces with the most on the back end, so it’s like peering into a crystal ball of data.

Maybe it’s a random VP of Financial Planning and Analysis, some actuary who de-risks executive decisions. Maybe it’s a general counsel or a random person they just happen to hang out with because they were in the same sorority or book club. The point is that establishing multiple contacts to gather information and support, using the multi-threading strategy, is often the best way to obtain personal cell numbers. There have been deals opened up and won using this strategy. In LinkedIn, go beyond just looking down the list of people “also viewed” in someone’s profile. Live in Sales Navigator to find the real sales clues for identifying the executive power base and its linkages.

Of course, the easiest way to get to a C-level or board member is through someone they know and trust. In Sales Navigator, you can see connections in common and connections within one’s own company. How many times does your own CTO know a prospect’s CXO (CIO, CFO, CEO, VP of Engineering, etc.), but you as a seller feel too disconnected internally to leverage that connection? Be up front with your sales manager and country head that you will be asking for pertinent internal referrals when you start your new job, and ensure that they sign you up for Sales Navigator Enterprise Edition. This will allow you to see how your entire company, not just licensed Navigator users, connects into the prospect’s employee base.

Who do you work with or know who knows someone in this dream account? That’s the most important path to revenue that I show you. Fortune favors the bold, so you have to reach very high immediately, go upstream of the dreaded RFP or purchasing cycle, and start generating value with the right group of people. Start sparking them with your content, and start showing them what’s possible.

Anatomy of Giving Good Social Phone

Again, kudos to Kenny Madden for coining the term the social phone. COMBO Prospecting is the idea that multiple contacts and blended channels are more powerful. A cold call is bold but quite dumb because you are simply taking a shot in the dark. Now it’s really a quick search to find the kind of intel on a prospect that used to take months. I liken this to sending letters back to the British Empire by boat versus Skype today. With a simple Sales Navigator profile skim, a Google search, or a look into your CRM system history, you can glean a strong reference point to begin creating trust and position yourself as an expert. Some people call this the ledge of a call. Always do pragmatic research on their industry, their company, and the individual. Then make the approach all about them rather than about you.

You will notice that many a calling template looks exactly the same, saying “how are you today?” and asking for the “appropriate person” or “just 15 minutes of your time.” Don’t use them! Friending approaches and sales speak simply paint you as a low-level seller. When following up, never use phrases such as “checking in” and “touching base.” Never, ever remind them of your failed past attempts to reach them. Finally, never show any form of frustration with them ignoring you; just remain politely determined to break through.

Jill Konrath’s SNAP Selling does a phenomenal job of breaking down the clichés. Her first book, Selling to Big Companies, is highly recommended reading about how to nail the “what to say and how to say it” part of prospecting.

Everything hinges on the phone because email alerts, text messages, Facebook Messenger updates, Twitter direct messages or mentions, LinkedIn InMails, and more all take place on smartphone apps. What you really have to conceptualize is that you get an unprotected clear shot to the prospect if you communicate outside of EA hours, which is when a direct message could actually reach a VP.

LinkedIn is the world’s first self-healing database or social CRM. When you build out a custom stream in Sales Navigator by saving all your best leads and accounts, you suddenly have a fertile calling bed from which to make prospecting calls the next day. For example, you could call just people mentioned in the news or just contacts who have shared an article or update. You could interact with the update by liking or commenting and then pick up the phone and mention something you read. This already puts you ahead of 99 percent of lazy salespeople.

There is no excuse for giving bad phone because there is no need for any call to be cold, and you should now have a value narrative that never mentions your products or solutions. Anyone can find context for engagement by leveraging the power of social and then, rather than friending, lead with value. Stay calm and just have a normal conversation. It’s not astrophysics. You don’t need elaborate social selling systems or scripts. Simply be human and create value in the conversation for the person on the other end.

Some other versions of the social phone for mid- and lower-funnel include Skype, GoToMeeting, LogMeIn, BlueJeans, Webex, Join.Me, and Zoom. Video conferencing is ubiquitous, so do all you can to get face-to-face this way as the next best thing to being on-site.

Technologies tend to diverge not converge. Despite the massive convergence of the smartphone, you’ll notice the plethora of apps and the fact that humans still do call each other, still have tablets, laptops, desktops, TVs, and keep adding to their tech stack just about every widget and doodad conceivable. But when you take the train or bus, what do you see? Everyone is glued to their smartphone and has their earbuds in. Texting is the next event horizon, and Mark Hunter has written brilliantly about ways to leverage text for prospecting properly today.

Pick up the social phone. The social phone means that you’ve used LinkedIn Sales Navigator or Premium to identify your best prospects. You’ve then used something like Data.com or DiscoverOrg to get direct dials. You’ve then called (and texted them) about what they’re sharing on social media and left a message about the relevant bits they have showed they care about. Now you’re blending, and you’re not shackled by analysis paralysis. You’ve done less than a minute of pre-call targeting to get a quick topic to pivot on once you connect live. It’s really devilishly simple. Use whatever LinkedIn feed you have access to for visibility into what prospects care about so you can call them with relevant conversation starters.

COMBO selling is designed to get you 1–3X pipeline within two quarters. While the social sellers are connecting and helping, you’ve already gotten your triple or quad returned and you’re in discovery mode. Those who embrace the social phone get into the sales cycle much faster than the pure social sellers. Sometimes social sellers miss the boat entirely, feeling proud that they now have 50 more CFO connections even though it’s probably their EA or virtual assistant who managed it for them.

Getting pumped to go make 30 triples is a matter of mindset. I love that scene in Caddyshack where Chevy Chase is getting into the zone by “being the ball.” You’re reaching out and touching someone, but you’re wired at the reptilian brain level to abhor rejection. So how can you buck the trend and do it anyway? Mindset and discipline: This is the idea that the more hits you take, the more fired up you get. It reminds me of an MMA fighter taking blows and just smiling and begging for more, dancing around the ring trash talking. The best fighters know they’re going to take a few hits on the chin, so they’re mentally prepared.

Remaining calm and being real are critical components of successful calling psychology. Speaking from the heart, being honest, and not having the movie phone voice are crucial. You’re better off dialing through 10 or 20 numbers and just having conversations than overthinking it.

The number-one rule of prospecting by phone is “make it a game and have fun!” You may say, “But Tony, I fear it worse than death and dismemberment!” I know . . . what’s wild about calling is how long it can take to make 50 dials if you don’t time-block. It’s crucial to shut everything off, keep a manual log, and keep your triples short. Lock yourself in a room and throw away the key! You should be able to bang out 30 to 50 calls and send immediate email follow-ups in under two hours.

You may be thinking right now, This guy is repetitive . . . time-blocking, 30 triples—how many times is going to say this? Yep, but will you actually do it? Very few actually do.

Decide you’re going to enjoy getting a “no” because it means no more false hope. Every one of them takes you closer to a “yes,” and every one of them stops you wasting any more time or energy with someone who will not buy from you.

When you connect, calmly explain the reason you are calling as if you were calling a friend or relative with good advice. Exert calm, confident, and positive control. “I am calling because . . .” Then focus on the business value you offer rather than droning on about your company and products. Explain why they should talk with you—what’s in it for them. Give proof of your value by telling them about other clients for whom you’ve delivered bottom-line results in terms of dollars, percentage improvements, and also gains in KPIs or metrics that they care about. Do you actually understand how your customers measure progress and results in their business? What are their industry benchmarks for customer retention, and what is their rate of churn? If they use net promoter score (NPS), what is the industry benchmark, and how do they rank comparatively? If they measure debtors, do they use daily sales outstanding (DSO), and what is best practice in their industry?

Make sure you have a preset list of direct dials, or even switchboard numbers if that’s all you can source, and the “who’s who in the zoo” you’re going to reach out to beforehand. Here’s a huge secret: Call directly out of your Sales Navigator feed. Use a clear phone line, not a scratchy cell phone in a back boiler room. Never use hands-free because you sound like you’re in the bottom of a well, and you may cause distrust if they wonder who else is listening. Some people like a landline and some use headsets, but the risk with headsets is that they can be scratchy if Bluetooth batteries go low. VoIP over a lousy network is worse, as packet loss creates chop—the most distracting of the telephone audio problems. Cell phones are, interestingly, often the highest fidelity, lowest latency option, depending on where you are relative to towers and congestion.

A great noise-cancelling microphone can do wonders and lets you talk with your hands, which, for most people, directly affects how natural they sound. I am always amused when I see people walking down a crowded street, gesturing like crazy to make a point to the person on the other end of their hands-free cell calls. Anyone who won’t invest $100 or so in great gear is not taking the phone or their career seriously. Test your signal by calling a friend or loved one. Again, unless you’re The Donald, never make business calls using a hands-free phone!

When you call into organizations, call the top dog first, the CEO of the problem you solve. Call the C-level executive who reigns supreme over all the domains to which you can deliver benefits. The CFO will refer you to the CIO, and the CIO can’t refuse the CFO. There’s a pecking order; you all know this. The board member regulates the CEO because that leader has to answer to the board’s whims. The first-biggest mistake is trying to start with a bottom-up groundswell.

Call in high and ask the executive assistant for guidance after you’ve treated her like she is actually the CEO rather than a gatekeeper. Mike Scher suggests treating the EA as a tour guide. Whatever you do, you must push beyond their trigger response to ask you for an email or your capabilities deck, which they plan to file away in the trash email folder.

Leverage fear to your advantage. If you’re not scared to talk to the person you’re about to call first in that account, you’re calling too low. Without butterflies in your stomach, just like the ones you had before you asked your significant other on that first date or to marry you, you’re not reaching your full potential in prospecting. Face the fear and do it anyway. Discomfort is the price of success.

You’ve got to stay psyched throughout the calling block because you’re going to have streaks where all you get are sterile machines. If you follow the COMBO core method, you will start to get some immediate email pings back. So have faith and don’t lose heart!

Everyone is trying to get your email out of their in-box or your request off their desk. They will push it down and sideways around the organizational chart ad infinitum. Your emails and voice mails are going to get forwarded all around in a massive game of telephone until you get the lantern fish to come forward. Stay on message knowing that you must be able to pitch your technology in a way that a two-year-old could understand. Practice with your spouse, who is already putting up with your sales mumbo jumbo! At the end of the day, all prospects care about is making or saving money.

To paraphrase the late, great David Sandler, “You can’t derive your satisfaction from selling.” You can’t define your self-worth or happiness by whether or not you succeed or fail on the phone that day. You must be bigger than that and take the high road. Keep yourself whole inside, and be the prime mover committed to making a positive difference for your customers. Don’t be shaken by any negative feedback. Keep pushing through the morass that is the slog of outbound prospecting. Build a tremendous daily cadence and be rigorous. Massive discipline is how you hit that same list day after day after day. After a while, opportunities unlock like a series of gates in the Panama Canal.

Positive mental attitude (PMA) is everything. You’ve got to be curious and get a kick out of making the dials and hearing the voice of the one you seek to help. Directly address the prospect by name, and super briefly explain why you’re calling. Don’t ask: “Is this a good time?” Don’t ask: “How are you today?” Just provide brief context, and then go right into the reason you’re calling and the way you quantifiably helped a similar company. Selling is the transference of belief, so show you believe you can help them. Confidence is king, and content of your conversation is queen.

Sell the appointment, not the product. Brian Tracy is a huge proponent of this. Sometimes disarming them with blatant appointment setting makes them say, “You’ve got three minutes right now—hit me.”

Be blunt. Ask outright for a meeting, no circumlocution or beating around the bush. Be honest about your motives to set an appointment. Tell them it’s important, and then ask: “When is the best time to meet?”

After making 10,000 hours of prospecting calls over three decades, I’ve found a bizarre inertia that plays out. When I resist making the calls, it feels like a Sisyphean task (pushing a boulder up a hill) to get back on the horn. When I start pounding away on the blower with reckless abandon, it gets easier and easier, and hark . . . I connect. That’s the beauty of a focused two hours of phone prospecting—it pays dividends.

While you’re calling, visualize connecting with key prospects. Set an intention to make contact at the highest practical level, and you’ll be surprised how often you get someone amazingly high up the food chain that you never believed you could talk to.

You really should read Jill Konrath, as she is brilliant about the phone. Here also are some tips from my good friend Steve Hall:

Spend a lot of time on a generic message, and then tailor it to every individual to hit their hot spots. (Caveat from me: Sometimes there is a relevance paradox where too much tailoring could look needy, so it’s a fine line.)

Be prepared. You will be asked to send emails, you’ll get voice mail, you’ll get EAs, and very occasionally you’ll get the CEO. Have a plan prepared with template content for each eventuality.

In your message, use curiosity and tell them as little as possible commensurate with getting a meeting. Your value proposition isn’t about why they should buy from you; it’s about why they should talk with you.

Be confident and develop rapport with the EA, and remember everything they say to you. You’ll use it next time because often you’ll have to make multiple calls to build familiarity.²¹

Giving good phone is ultimately about preparing and then being courageous and relentlessly disciplined, just like Jeff Horn, who won a world title in a massive upset by endlessly moving forward, hitting Manny Pacquiao’s fists with his face to get close and battle on his own terms. Beyond relentless courage you also need the right narrative, and you must feel passionately worthy to become the trusted adviser who engineers consensus and a winning business case for the customer. Self-belief, passion, cunning, determination. You need all this to execute COMBO with the phone. You must also have the ability to eat rejection for breakfast and spit it into the bucket in the corner while they shove smelling salts up your nose . . . bring it on!

Growth Hacks—Thinking like a Marketer

Each day when you get to work, be data driven and see who opened your previous outreach the most by using tools such as Cirrus, ToutApp, or YesWare. Follow up again if you see a number greater than three. Many times, you’ll send outreach to a CXO and see 25 shares, and you can see from which device and region of the country as well. You should be sending out all your presentations in ClearSlide so you can track which page they stick on the longest; yes, it’s often the pricing page. Ensure that all outreach and attachments can be tracked for engagement.

You want to be a micro-marketer and create some thought leadership pieces in LinkedIn Publisher. These should talk about the top three to five pain points you solve for clients, along with anonymized case studies and Challenger-style content. When you rattle the cages and shake up the trees, 85 percent of prospects are going to go assess who you are on social, specifically LinkedIn, and view your profile. You should have built a strong brand there, with compelling articles posted. This sets the tone and establishes you as a high-caliber subject-matter expert who is trusted by others in the field.

If you’re at the pinnacle of your sales career journey, you’ll have a very specific named account list or you’ll work regionally in specific target prospect companies. You’ll have three to five arch competitors, and the pressure of commoditization will be bearing down, causing buyers to focus on price and wait as long as possible before dealing with the likes of you, the self-described “trusted adviser” salesperson. I don’t know about you, but I’d engage only with people who exhibit the brass cajones to phone me up and convince me that I could be making a lot more money if I intelligently considered changing from my crumbling status quo!

Interruption only works when it’s relevant, so having intel on the decision-makers is essential. The likelihood of landing a meeting with a powerful decision-maker—who can fast track you into an active evaluation or smoke out the actual buying committee—increases 10 times when you are using Sales Navigator, your own CRM data, Google, and a sales intelligence suite. Are you mixing LinkedIn Sales Navigator custom streams to do advanced searches, saving the right people in each account, and finding linchpin content to reach out with over the phone with your sales intelligence tools?

Here’s how to penetrate any account. Let’s say you’re selling Salesforce to Acme Widget Company. You would first search your own CRM (Salesforce integrates with Sales Navigator and everything else that matters), and then look up the account in DiscoverOrg. It would instantly give you the direct dials and emails of the head of sales, head of marketing, and executive leadership. You would cross-reference this to Sales Navigator’s view of that prospect (they won’t even know you’re viewing them if you use Navigator). You read their profiles and study the last 10 posts they have shared. Now Google their names + the company name and filter results in News to see quotes from an individual at a recent conference, interview, or press release.

Now call the direct lines and reference what they’ve said, and then leap into your value narrative: “In working with others in your industry, I’m seeing XYZ as a key issue. Is that something you’re grappling with as you seek to acquire and retain more of the right customers? I’d like to share some ideas on this; when can you clear some space in your calendar for 40 minutes?” If you get voice mail, mention their quote and that you have relevant ideas based on it. Say that you want to discuss how they could better drive top-line revenue.

Once you’ve identified any level of heartbeat within the prospect organization, you need to think like a marketer seeking to nurture the buyer throughout their journey. There are systems such as Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot, which effectively execute lead nurturing where high-value prospects go into a drip sequence. You can retarget these prospects with white papers on LinkedIn. You can go remarket to these folks across Facebook. You’d typically partner up with marketing to pull off these latter scenarios, but the mere act of proactively collaborating with the marketing team will set you apart and favor you for driving leads within your own company.

Secure buy-in internally to fund a Very Important Top Officer campaign; here is how VITO (Parinello) works for me. I’ve never met a C-level who doesn’t accept courier mail or a FedEx envelope. Inside is a plain manila envelope with just their name and then inside a single page with no company logo on it. The letter states the bottom-line business case of increased revenue, efficiency, cost savings, innovation to carve out a competitive advantage, and a very specific time you’ll call or would like to meet. Then you’ve got a shot. The CEOs I’ve spoken to say they aren’t looking to make friends or talk about their kids and fishing trip. You’ve got to be relevant and to-the-point without being arrogant or bragging about your clientele. All they care about is what you can prove you can do for them to transform results.

One last growth hack is around closing deals by discussing money up front to build constructive tension. But you also want to gate the deal by always putting up a high price tag and then understanding if there’s a threshold that avoids a request for proposal (RFP). You can always restrict the contract terms to a certain cap or ceiling, but this will allow you to strike early to take the deal off the table for competition. It relates to prospecting because you have to operate like the most venomous snake in the Australian outback—it developed that lethal injection because prey is scarce. For those disruptive sellers or entrepreneurs, this is sound advice in any market.

Ghost Your Own CEO’s Profile

This one is hard to believe, but CEOs will often allow a senior salesperson to ghost-drive their LinkedIn profile and work with preapproved content and template messages. What’s really wild about ghost-driving is that even being the CEO of a hot start-up company doesn’t guarantee you a meeting.

Most CEOs are consumed by delivering for their company, and many neglect their personal life and brand. Burnout is common. Why don’t you offer personal education and assistance to the CEO on how to build their personal brand in B2B social? In doing so, you can personally help them while also driving revenue for the company. Here is why it works. Senior customer executives are more likely to meet a peer from the potential supplier organization. This is because it strokes their egos, and they believe there will be industry or competitor insights rather than a sales pitch.

You can differentiate and outmaneuver your competition by ghost-driving for CEOs. Analysis on the social presence of every Fortune 500 CEO was published on CEO.com.²² Here are some of the findings, which showed little change in behavior from the previous survey:

Sixty-one percent of CEOs have no social presence on any of the top six social platforms.

Of those who are on social, 70 percent are solely on LinkedIn.

Forty percent of CEOs on Twitter don’t tweet at all.

Almost none understand social strategy and the interconnectedness of all the platforms.

Become the trusted expert your own CXO can rely upon. Don’t be intimidated. It’s not as scary as you think, and here is how to execute once you have the keys to their LinkedIn. Focus outreach around events where your CEO can appear. It reduces friction when a CEO is inviting a prospect to Dreamforce or another relevant conference or thought leadership dinner. This is infinitely better than trying to land discovery calls where the prospect, another C-level, knows they’re going to get cornered or guilted into moving forward with an evaluation they may not want. They also just don’t want to disappoint someone they respect.

A powerful strategy here is to get your CEO, president, or cofounder to start sharing thought leadership articles on LinkedIn. I’ve seen trusted senior salespeople gain access to their CEO’s LinkedIn profile and start to land event invites this way. I’ve done it myself for my clients. You could conceivably utilize this idea for prospecting, but you need to have the necessary level of trust with your CEO. Especially powerful is to ghost-drive your CEO’s LinkedIn account around a specific event that they are going to attend. Here is why it makes sense.

An outside sales call costs up to six times more than an inside sales call.²³ On this note, many a start-up heeds the siren song of hiring guys in suits to go close enterprise deals ASAP. They increase their cash burn but not the commensurate revenue, and they start hemorrhaging money. Typically, they then fire the squadron before the first red ink dries on the MSA for a mere trial or pilot. You can make yourself the indispensable salesperson if you are the CEO’s ghost-driver; you’ll fireproof yourself and be the very last to be booted off the island!

It works this way: You use LinkedIn InMails and emails to set up neighborhood meetings for your CEO with you in attendance. These focus on a conference that’s coming up or a planned trip to a particular city. Ideally, you and your CEO go and team-sell at the meeting. If the CEO can’t attend, then you, acting as the CEO, simply hand off the meeting to yourself “due to unforeseen circumstances” just before the scheduled date.

There is even software to help you triangulate a large swath of potential clients in a geographical area! Data.com can be searched by city and state for a relevant list of prospects. RainKing also has a GPS-like heat map element that you can use to schedule a bunch of meetings around a nominated city with similar prospects. Even Sales Navigator, with its friendly Boolean search interface, enables you to identify the executives in a particular region.

Call the executive assistants of a targeted list, and be the EA of your own CEO. Ask if they can find 30 minutes for your boss and theirs to chew the fat. “Hi Daisy. My boss, the CEO, is in town Thursday speaking at a conference, and he asked me to tee up a meeting with your boss because he has some research he thought would be of interest to Bill. How is his calendar for dinner or breakfast on Wednesday? If that’s no good, how about 20 minutes for them to talk over coffee?” Simply being in their area dramatically ups the probability of a meeting. They can just open a conference room and meet with you and your boss. You’re already there, so they don’t have to feel guilty about committing you to travel costs.

Neighborhood techniques work flawlessly for conferences, too. Special thanks to Scott Britton, who came up with the best conference idea: Call every single prospect attending or on the speakers’ list. Then, either for yourself or your CXO, book a meeting room across the street at a premium hotel and secure back-to-back meetings there. In general, neighborhooding and setting meetings with like-minded people attending events is a good strategy. Throwing events while at conferences is also very powerful. Put together a VIP dinner with extra seats, and as C-levels roll through your booth that day, get 50 business cards and then text them all about the dinner. You should be able to fill out a dinner party of 20 that way.

Use your own CEO and CXO team to help you elevate everything you do. Be known internally as the stately honey badger that can build pipeline like no other in the history of the world. But also be known as someone who operates with intelligent stealth, finesse, gravitas, and business acumen. Be seen as someone who talks the language of customers and who understands the language of business, achieving important outcomes, managing risk, and delivering on a rock-solid business case.

In short, you are the one and only person worthy of the log-in and password of the CXO’s LinkedIn account. This is because you are intelligent, well-read, and have command of the English language. You humbly enhance their brand, work with prearranged templates and scripts, build out their network with high-quality contacts, and leverage their own time to drive growth in their business.

Sales Coaching from a CEO Buyer

Six months before finalizing content for this book, I delivered a two-day sales training workshop in Singapore. We had more than 80 salespeople and managers in attendance from seven countries, and the primary purpose was to enable everyone to personally create sales pipeline.

I was told: “The number-one problem salespeople have is not having enough pipeline.” Yet lack of pipeline is a symptom rather than a root cause. The real issues are typically a lack of disciplined daily activity in working referrals and prospecting. More root issues are:

Not enough know-how in driving sales success through old-school high levels of effective activity combined with new-school digital engagement

Lack of customer industry knowledge or poor understanding of the client

Inability to leverage personal networks and technologies to find the right path for connection with decision-makers

Inadequate insight and value narrative needed for senior engagement

The VP of Sales who engaged me for the workshop with his team is a sales master in every sense of the term. He and I were in harmony from the beginning. He maintained a laser-like focus on helping his sellers create an industry-specific point of view that they could take to potential clients. As part of the agenda, he invited Hari Krishnan, CEO at Property Guru Group, to join for a one-hour interview. Property Guru is the market leader in its industry in Asia and, prior to this CEO role, Hari held board of director positions and was head of LinkedIn in the Asia-Pacific region and Japan. As such, he is impeccably credentialed to provide the most senior buyer perspective.

He was asked this powerful question: “On what basis do you as the CEO of a market leader engage directly with sellers?” Everyone at the workshop was riveted, and here is my paraphrase of this sage CEO’s advice for sellers (with my own advice added occasionally within brackets):

If you want to get to me then it’s going to happen only through a warm introduction from someone I know and trust. Understanding the nature of my relationship with the introducer will give you some context into how I am likely to receive your introduction.

Cultivate multiple stakeholders in my organization and educate them on your solution, too. I don’t make unilateral decisions or try to push decisions down the organization, so you need to build multiple relationships.

Don’t be creepy personal. Stick to business early in the relationship. Don’t stalk on personal social platforms such as Facebook. I’m not seeking a new friend or looking for someone to buy me a meal or host me at an event. [Senior successful people are incredibly busy and would rather invest their time with family or where they have strong personal relationships.]

Do your research. Seeking a conversation with me without doing your homework is unprofessional and shows a lack of respect. Don’t drop names of competitors or reference industry trends that are not relevant to my region or business. The examples you use need to be from within my geography and relate to what is happening in my markets.

Know my industry. As the market leader, I am not chasing disruptors, but I am interested in what relevant companies are doing. Know whom I define as my competition (current and emerging), and bring me insights about them, their strategies and initiatives. I am not seeking confidential information or trade secrets, nor should you offer them, but you must bring a perspective that is of value to me. [The VP of Sales doing the interview later commented that sellers should always seek to be a customer of their prospective client, or talk to some of their customers, as part of their own research. They should then take a perspective on how that experience could be improved.]

Don’t appear arrogant. Assuming that your brand alone is the reason I should buy from you is a mistake. [If you’re the market leader, don’t tell the customer that you are dominant. Instead use the term leader, and earn their interest and trust rather than assume it.]

Take the time to understand how I define success. Know what motivates our organization and how we measure improvement and success. Focus on how you can help me achieve our KPIs and performance measures.

Aspire to be a trusted adviser. Not in a clichéd way, but differentiate yourself in the way you engage our organization by acting in our best interests rather than your own. Resist the urge to push and close when we are not ready. Trusted adviser status for a seller is achieved over time through alignment with my organization’s success and me. “Your focus should be on my success as the customer rather than on your sales goal.”²⁴

According to Hari Krishnan, the three levels of relationship are:

1.Trusted adviser: I collaborate with you and involve you deeply in my planning process, and there is emotional, personal connection and trust.

2.Partner: I regard you as being strategic to my business, and I solicit your thoughts in the planning process.

3.Vendor: I transact with you and focus on price as the primary way of defining greater value.

This dispels the myth that trusted adviser is unachievable for sellers. Here is more important advice from me:

Don’t use LinkedIn as a spamming platform; instead, use it to research and find the best path for a warm introduction.

Referrals are the fastest and highest probability for acquiring a new customer. This is why you must cultivate your networks and nurture your own brand.

Once you’ve secured your path for an introduction, you need the right narrative to form the basis of the conversation, and it should set the agenda on insight and value.

Treat the EA with respect, and have empathy for his need to protect the boss. Seek guidance and coaching.

You must be wildly persistent across multiple channels if you are to break through.

In reading all this, you now have enough information to be the number-one performer in your company. Let’s now look at supercharging lead flow and then turning up the heat deeper in the funnel. Then you can close predictably based on how you open a relationship, with the agenda firmly set on value and trust.

Supercharge Lead Flow—Pulling It All Together

If you’re lucky, you have the ultimate sales machine: a crack team of SDRs firing on all cylinders, marketing driving a high-value content strategy, industry events, and a lead-nurturing machine, augmented with a third-party appointment-setting company like Frontline Selling. On top of that, you obsessively create quality opportunities yourself. All this means you have the healthiest pipeline in the known universe and exude nonhunger. You no longer need to pressure anyone to buy but rather work based on alignment of timing and priorities within your customer base. Your competitors entice you to move to them every month, and you just say, “No thanks, I’m happy here.”

You know that compartmentalizing the business development roles isn’t necessarily as powerful as having everyone in the organization, up to your own CEO, accountable to opening qualified conversations. In essence, everyone is responsible for setting meetings with qualified prospects, and you’re seen as the lead dog. It’s the most important responsibility of every employee in the company because the best product in the world is of little consequence without new clientele to benefit from its transformative results.

Regardless of the level of support, even if there’s almost none, you drive your own marketing and pipeline creation. You obsessively focus on trigger events and referrals as the fastest path and highest probability of a sale. You are keenly aware that being strategic, by definition, means injecting yourself during the customer’s “ignorant and unaware” phase to educate and inspire them to consider a far better state of affairs. You artfully spring from the bushes on social and grab the prospective customer’s attention on the phone by delighting them with your surprising insights and business acumen. You guide them to their happy place of better results and a more secure career.

Your personal hallmark is disciplined, intelligent determination as you engineer value and the customer’s buying process to eliminate competition. Most of your time is invested in building high-quality opportunity pipeline. Then you are qualifying whether a prospect is in a window where you can influence and build a business case with a future-state vision that drags them away from status quo apathy. A typical day in your work life as a masterful COMBO prospector looks like this. It’s late afternoon, so you block all distractions and then:

You take a plain piece of paper and pen that writes fast. You date it. Beside the clean plain sheet is your messy COMBO action sheet from the last 24 hours with tally marks. You now create your fresh call sheet for tomorrow.

You get to work and check Cirrus, ToutApp, or YesWare for your analytics: Who clicked, who opened, who forwarded your emails?

You open your shared spreadsheet called Key Target Accounts that lists your top 50 target names in alphabetical order. Each name has the date of last contact next to it, and you’ve memorized the “who’s who of the zoo.”

You study the organizational chart in DiscoverOrg or RainKing, looking for triggers there and also in the Sales Navigator feed.

It’s approaching knock-off time for your prospects, and they are emerging from meetings. The perfect time to strike with high-intensity COMBO outreach! You first look each one up on LinkedIn, then you go to COMBO—basic triples at first.

You’re running hot and in the flow, so you adopt sextets: phone, voice mail, InMail, email, text, Twitter DM. Where possible, you call and email directly out of the CRM.

You leave concise value narrative messages on voice mail, plus leave your phone number twice and say, “I’ll follow up with a note.”

As rapidly as possible, you send an email to the prospect that opens by referencing that you just tried their line, or write “as per my voice mail . . .”

You operate with confidence and know in your heart, soul, and every fiber of your being that you can help them, that they will want to talk to you once they understand how you can transform their business results. Your tone conveys the confidence that they will take your meeting.

On a high, you stop, and your updated list is now the call sheet for tomorrow morning. It has an added column for you to track the number of COMBOs executed with new tally marks. Most everyone else has left for the day, but you leave knowing you’ve earned success and that you’re ready to be hyper-effective the next morning.

The next morning, you wake and shower with caffeine soap. On the way into the office, you consume a triple-shot coffee with a Red Bull chaser. You arrived before everyone else and, standing at your Varidesk so you’re ergonomically poised with your headset, you take the updated list you created the previous evening. Then:

You smile and immediately jump into COMBO outreach with all those folks, again after first looking them up on LinkedIn. You limit yourself to 90 seconds of research on each prospect before dialing. Where you can, you go the extra mile and adopt sextets: phone, voice mail, InMail, email, text, Twitter DM. Again, where possible, you call and email directly out of CRM.

You follow the exact same COMBO process as the day before.

As you finish your calls, the bewildered “sheeple” meander onto the sales floor like lambs to the slaughter to fire up their computers. Then they head out for java to complain about how the compensation plan is unfair, the marketing leads are poor, the SDRs aren’t booking enough meetings for them, and no one answers the phone (when they themselves don’t bother calling).

It’s 9:30 a.m. and you decline the invitation for coffee so you can instead update the CRM for the next hour or so, and then jump into dedicated activity on the opportunities already qualified and well into the sales funnel.

You go to lunch having done more than a full day’s work.

Before you go home that day, around 4:30 p.m., you go again. Like Rocky, you bounce out of your corner ready to hit your prospects. Bam! Rejection—you just grin and move forward, ever forward, COMBO after COMBO.

Then victory! Engagement with the right people based upon the right narrative and your persistence.

Call it whatever you choose: Sowing and reaping, attracting what you radiate, karma, God’s blessing, the universe’s favor—the harder you intelligently work, sincerely wanting the best for your customers, the more successful you will be. Luck has very little to do with it.

Turning Up the Heat Deeper in the Funnel

I could write another entire book on the subject of leveraging COMBO for things like negotiation and closing. What I have learned is that once the marlin is on the line, you must strip line (let it run) at times—but in the enterprise battleground, wild persistence is how you reel the fish into the boat. Once you’ve opened an opportunity, you cannot rest on your laurels. You must continue to educate, enable, and reach out via all manner of channels, even mid-funnel.

Once you’ve had the first on-site, bring some solutions experts and go meet again. Pre-wire each meeting with personal calls to understand agendas. Go in and cross-sell to the account while closing the first sale. Multi-thread and meet with more senior, more junior, and lateral contacts. If you are single-threaded in a deal, you’re at high risk.

In her phenomenal book SNAP Selling, Jill Konrath talks about raising priorities as the P in SNAP. The book talks about counterintuitive ways to break into big accounts. The power of creating a sense of urgency and harnessing FOMO (fear of missing out) cannot be underestimated.

Deals go to the grave 90 days out, even on an 18-month sales cycle. You want to engage early, up high, and thread the account to as many friendly stakeholders as possible who will talk to you and “conduct the symphony” for both sides. The top seller closing Fortune 10 accounts is bringing in their own CTO, CMO, and CEO. This seller is bringing in multiple teams on both sides, both tactical and strategic, to craft a custom solution that is complex enough to maintain a value differential and box out competitors selling on features alone.

Jim Holden talks about this in his Four Stage Model. The key takeaway is to make a customer look like a hero by choosing you, as measured in cost savings, efficiency, revenue generated, innovation, and competitive advantage. These are the primary reasons that deals get done. Massive ROI happens, and people get promoted or leverage that breakthrough to switch companies into an even more influential role. Salespeople who embrace COMBO cultivate success at every level. Over the years, they focus on a vertical where they develop a massive network and subject-matter expertise that allows them to freely consult and advise on a range of issues. They may even recommend other harmonic vendors.

Imagine pulling a marlin into a deep-sea fishing boat. It takes one hell of an effort. In boxing, it’s that final knockout punch after you’ve done rope a dope. This is a boxing strategy of pretending to be trapped against the ropes, enticing the opponent to throw tiring, ineffective punches. Muhammad Ali coined the term in the 1970s when he referred to a tactic he employed against George Foreman. Look how tactical Ali was, thinking on his feet, appearing weak when he was strong. Lying in wait, you must be patient and fiercely disciplined so as not to reveal too many cards and lose the fight.

You’ve got to have explosive cunning to knock out your opponent, and you’ve got to have the same to clinch a massively competitive strategic sale. You’re waiting for your moment when the stars align and you have the perfect shot. Make no mistake, it’s going to take massive action to steal business away from entrenched competitors who out-resource you in the knife fight of modern sales. The extra mile is a lonely place, and the vendor who gives their all in the process gains the richest reward as prospects take notice. Trusted adviser status is granted based on intent, value, effort, and collaboration. Teamwork unleashes the sword in the stone.

Dispelling Myths of the Serial Closer

The way you open a relationship and set the agenda is indeed far more important than how you seek to close. Thrashing around desperately pushing for the order is for amateurs. As stated earlier, the closing COMBO depends on 1) coverage, 2) trust and confidence, and 3) commitment and partnership.

Asking for the customer’s business must be earned and attempted only after the buyer has signaled they are ready to take that next step. The seller should never attempt to close until these three bases are covered:

1.Establish trust and rapport by being authentic, insightful, and a domain expert.

2.Agree on the compelling business value, as defined by them and with a future-state vision and rock-solid business case.

3.Understand their timing and priorities, as well as their process for evaluation, selection, and procurement.

Many salespeople make the mistake of pressuring their potential client when the buyer isn’t in a position to commit to the purchase. Managers often push their sales team to offer discounts on one hand and threats of a price increase on the other if the buyer fails to meet the seller’s deadline. Chris Beall says, “Pressure-filled closing is often a symptom of a weak, thin pipeline which creates rational desperation.” I’ve had crazy bosses over the years instruct my teams and me to go sit in the reception areas of client offices until we have the order. Threatening customers, withdrawing discounts, and acting desperate is the worst way to attempt a close.

Difficulty in closing is almost always a symptom of not opening the relationship properly or not managing the sales process effectively. This is why having the right value narrative and executing COMBO masterfully at the opening phase is critical. Objections are usually evidence of the fact that the seller has made mistakes by pushing before trust and value have been established and without the necessary understanding of the customer’s timing, priorities, and processes.

All managers need to know that they cannot manage by results and must instead focus on driving activities and actions while coaching strategy and skills. Read Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana to go deep on this topic. Ask the right questions at the beginning of the quarter, and help identify and execute the right actions that create progression of the sale. Firing up the blowtorch with just days to go for hitting sales targets, after neglecting the inputs that create success, is a surefire way to damage relationships, undermine credibility, and drive down price and margin.

A deal, once properly qualified and quantified, will naturally follow an organic progression to a close—but not on its own. Maintain intensity and momentum using COMBO to touch everyone who represents risk and who can provide support. Objections are signs that you’ve made a blunder or you’re misaligned with the buyer. If you sell technology, you’ll have two sides to every deal, the strategic and the technical. You should be smart enough to be the conductor of the symphony and bring in your sharpest stakeholders on either side. The buyer has a supporting cast and so should you.

So much has been written about the art of closing, and all the Glengarry Glen Ross “coffee is for closers” style high-pressure techniques are stale as a cracker. What you need to do is build synergy in collaboration on a solution worth more than the sum of its parts. You need to foster interactivity around solving a problem or unlocking an opportunity. You need to mutually quantify a business case based on the relevant use-cases that prove economic value as seen in cost savings or revenue uptick. By communicating this intention and sitting on their side of the table from the start, you’ve got a shot.

The myth is that a close is something that you do to the prospect, not with the customer. In fact, if you focus intently on the delivery phase of customer execution, you can build out a logical sequence of events that includes a “go live” date. By focusing the customer’s attention on the product or service going live within their organization and beginning to deliver the value from day one of the effective date, they’ve already preclosed in their mind. You work backward from that positive outcome, saying something like, “I don’t consider myself successful until this is delivering for you and your company.” That’s being a transparent trusted adviser because it’s not about a fat commission and handoff to others; instead, you convey that you’re sticking around and seeing the implementation through. Some forward-thinking companies have instituted blended compensation plans to ensure that this happens, as there’s a vested interest in success and renewals.

There are a couple of critical gauges for understanding whether a deal is going to close and move forward. The first is whether the prospect is pulling from the front rather than the seller relentlessly pushing from behind. The second is the level of interactivity in the cycle. If you’re constantly chasing prospects down for their time, it’s unlikely to be a sizable agreement if it is one at all. So how can you influence this?

Savvy COMBO salespeople are focused on fostering interactivity at many levels in the organization: top-down, bottom-up, middle-out, C-suite, board of directors, and warm referrals in network. They leave no stone unturned, building groundswell and connectivity into the account as they accelerate the deal to a close.

The tipping point is once the deal goes from brainstorming with the client to the client starting to push you to reach climax. Since “opening is the new closing” (according to Anthony Iannarino), you should start conversations with the main decision-makers, lateral stakeholders, IT head (if you sell technology), and other stakeholders. Any group that your solution touches, who could be brought in early to build even more consensus, is worth reaching out to with blended COMBO methods to build an army of support.

At the end of the day, there is no ability to close or even propose a solution, unless you are masterfully effective at prospecting and opening. SPIN, solution selling, value selling, Challenger, Miller Heiman, strategic selling, Sandler, and all the qualification frameworks—they are all moot unless you have an actual live and kicking prospect. If you can’t gain access to the buyer, if you’re incapable of carrying the right value narrative, if you cannot secure simple commitments for time and access at the beginning, then you’re knocked out before even stepping into the ring.

Yet closing is everything because nothing happens until someone creates a customer. The only measure of a man is his deeds. Deeds become legacy. The only measure of a seller is revenue. Revenue becomes growth and companies rise and fall on it.

You’ve probably read many articles about how closing is not important, and if you open properly, the deal will automatically close. Do you really think you can land a date that way or do a seven-figure deal? Do you really think you can succeed just by opening and never needing to ask the big question or handle objections? Winning a new client requires the COMBO of opening with value, building relationships of trust, building consensus and a business case, and then closing with confidence. It should never be a white-knuckle adventure; instead, it must be a logical and agreeable next step for the customer.

Humans are mostly fear-based, and C-levels are risk-averse. There is a paradox with “opening as the new closing” because a worthwhile deal will not close itself. Although first impressions can be everything and you must tee up the deal, set the tone, and psychologically anchor the C-level prospect, you also need to engineer a decision to secure the contract. Sure, they can break off a paid pilot, but that’s probably the only exception you should ever allow. The answer is: You drive the close, every day. You’ve gotta drive the vision, which is the “art of the possible.” Sell today but sell the future, too. Sell the dream of transformational, spine-tingling future-state results.

I recently watched a deal go into legal contract review phase, and I was shocked to see the buyer go into redline review with two other vendors. Can you imagine that? Russian Roulette! Another classic Bake-Off with three bullets in the chamber where they could literally just sign any of the vendors. My client was backed into the corner, up against the ropes.

My advice: Don’t play the game; instead, phone the customer CEO. “This is not how to build a relationship of trust and partnership. If you’d like to negotiate, then we’re happy to do that. Otherwise we’re out.”

If they think they’re the hottest one at the bar and you walk away, they can’t stand it! This is because no one ever walked on Heather Locklear, Cleopatra, Alexander the Great, or Brad Pitt. No one ever walked on a telco with $50 billion in revenue. But you have the sheer hubris to actually do it, and that’s refreshing to the powerful. They love it when you lock horns—game on! Only the strong will survive. Never panic or sweat. When the piranha swarm, establish ethical presence and let them get focused on the negative selling tactics of the other two or three late entrants to the game. Let the client hear them hissing in despair, dropping price, caving in on terms, bending and twisting in the wind.

To recap, here’s how you close: Open the relationship with value, build trust and engineer consensus, collaborate on a compelling business case and align with their process. Then drive the sale every day as hard as you can. When you receive a verbal, consider it just getting started. Call every single day. Leave a message of resounding confidence. Send an email. Be persistent and strong. When you get the contract in redlines, call procurement every day. Get your C-levels aligned with theirs. When they say they’re going to sign on Monday and it’s Tuesday night, call in again. It’s at risk. As Brian Burns says: “What is not overtly positive is covertly negative.” Your competitor and their allies are always undermining you.

And here’s the final play: Save the CEO bullet for the end game. Do not play your CEO card until you’re in the final round. Sure, the CEO can open the first piece of an initial meeting when all members are present. Later, it’s better to let your executives grab some wine and clink a glass, to let them shoot you a text to “get it done” while they are behind the scenes where the power brokers break bread. In many situations, the important moments are known about in advance, and the CEO can be in reserve. On occasion, that moment can arise in the course of something else—even an integration discussion—and the CEO must be available. It’s like a straight right knockout punch: You better have it cocked and know how and when to fire it when the opening is there—and in some fights, that could be at an unexpected moment.

This is the way of captains and kings of industry. This is the way real business deals are getting done. This is closing. It’s not weak, and it’s not collaborative—a euphemism and excuse when you’re in a deadly waiting game. Customers want to buy, but they’ll never let you sell them. They buy on emotion and close on logic. They actually crave leadership, and they want you to take charge of the room and find a shared vision as the impresario of the theater. They don’t know how to talk to each other, collaborate, ideate, or see their businesses through the right lens. They’re afraid and insecure in many respects.

The piece that The Challenger Sale got right is that you must teach, tailor, and take control with key insight. In regard to closing, the piece you need to hear is about the inner game. You must be able to own a room, standing or relaxed at the head of a conference table, with Fortune 1000 executives. You must be able to radiate confidence in every interaction from pitch to proposal, to negotiation, to close, to legal redlines, to Docu-Sign. You fight like hell to open and to move through the mid-funnel, but you hammer full throttle like a bat out of hell, racing the daylight for that photo finish.

Know that Google has changed the game, and I never see a solo run. The minute prospects sense the end game, they panic and hit Search. They call two or three of your competitors and shop the bid. It’s instantaneous cutting at your knees. The top dogs I know are cool as ice. When the “alternative facts” roll in to poke holes in their solution, they laugh because they anticipated it.

I’m not going to give you 27 classic closes out of the ABC almanac. I’m going to tell the truth. Humans smell fear. All sales methodologies and processes succeed or fail for you based on one thing: your supreme confidence in yourself. The experience with the seller is 53 percent of why organizations buy (CEB Research). They need a powerful leader to hold their hand while they walk over fire coals to the promised land.

Remember, always to start the bidding at seven figures. Always walk. Always drive the sale until it’s inked, until the system is installed, until the commission check cashes in your investment account. Period. Then you can sleep. My final tip here: Be the hottest one at the bar. It’s your turn to be the one who got away. I’ve closed many a sale on a boomerang. It’s not about arrogance, but be willing to cash your chips and walk out of the casino. Pipeline cures all ills, and you’ll want for nothing—you’ve always got another bullet in the chamber.