CHAPTER ONE

Awful Truths That Can Set You Free

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

—IRON MIKE TYSON

EARLY IN MY LINKEDIN BLOGGING JOURNEY, A TROLL EMERGED and asked this question: “Who are you . . . really? No one can come from nowhere and know all this!” What he failed to realize is that I had taken 35 years to become an “overnight success” and what I shared in my articles was derived through failure and painful experience. I think I’ve done it all in sales: sold “the dream” in people’s homes, cold-called, canvassed for business up and down the street, sold to big corporations, pitched for venture capital, sold with hope and prayer, used Wile E. Coyote cunning, and worked hard like nothing else mattered. I’ve won and celebrated massive deals but also lost and learned. I’ve cried out of sheer exhausted frustration, feeling the task was simply beyond me. Even though I’ve topped the leader boards and been on president’s club trips, I know that selling can be a bipolar existence. I’ve faced impossible sales targets with lunatic bosses who have no empathy and no idea how to support the troops other than halving territories, increasing targets, and applying maximum pressure. Yet all of this has made me who I am today, resilient and wiser, because we’re forged in the furnace of life—pressure over time is what creates diamonds. You either implode or you become the honey badger (fiercest mammal on the planet who just doesn’t care about its own well-being).

Who we become determines the value of what we pursue, and worthwhile success is never easy. Eventually, I learned to love my team and my customers and to work for their success rather than my own. I’ve also learned that failure is a better teacher than winning, that you cannot really be successful on your own, and that the passage of time provides the lens through which to measure real success. Being able to look at yourself in the mirror and respect who you see is everything. Selling is not about our own achievements—it’s about the success of our customers and our commitment to helping them. Real sales leadership is helping someone achieve a far better state—and doing it with the belief of an evangelist, the passion of a lover, the courage of a warrior, the rigor of an engineer, the thoroughness of a forensic accountant, the diplomacy of a politician, the mindset of a marathon runner, and the discipline and determination of a world-champion martial artist.

Wake Up and Get in the Fight!

We all need “a whack to the side of the head” to snap us out of daydreaming just like Edward de Bono advocated all those years ago. Yet most sales-people are glass-jawed fools because they plan to merely hit their number with spoon-fed leads from marketing, inside sales, or social media activity, sprinkled with a little of their own extra effort.

Wake up! Get off the canvas! Sniff the smelling salts of truth. You’re behind on points, so you’ve gotta find a way to win with a one-two-three knockout combo! Over and over and over again; stick and jab, stick and jab, absorb the knocks; grind it out . . . and then boom! Professional selling is highly competitive, and there is constant pressure as you battle your inner demons, slugging it out against client apathy, barriers to engagement, and desperate competition. It goes 12 rounds, often 14, and it’s sometimes the technical knockout that wins when a razor-thin margin separates you from your competitor.

You don’t lose sales, competitors outsell you—and the biggest competitor you’ll ever face is doing nothing, aka the apathetic status quo. That’s Ali, that’s Frasier, that’s Tyson . . . for those who really know boxing, that’s Pacquiao or Roberto Duran. Everyone should watch Hands of Stone, about the versatile Panamanian brawler Duran, arguably one of the greatest of all time, who beat Sugar Ray Leonard with strategic combos. Boxing has so many parallels to sales, so any great boxing movie, including Raging Bull, can teach the modern seller much. The biggest battles you’ll face are from within. The discipline is not to expend too much energy in the first round, to be strategic rather than use brute force, to truly know your competition, and to leverage weaknesses. And these are just some examples.

Beyond sports metaphors and dating psychology, the best takeaways for sellers come from the strategic selling canon. These sales tomes include: Solution Selling (Eades and Bosworth), SPIN Selling (Neil Rackham), Miller Heiman works, New Power Base Selling (Jim Holden), Diagnostic Business Development (Jeff Thull), and The Challenger Sale (Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson). Many of these books emphasize landing meetings because, as Anthony Iannarino says, “Opening is the new closing!”¹

“The modern buyer is digitally driven, socially connected, mobile, and empowered,”² writes Jill Rowley. You therefore need a superior personal brand and social media savvy to break through or meet expectations. Even with this, clients treat you as a commodity and resist your efforts to engage; all the while, the clock is ticking down and the judges are scoring every move. You’re only as good as your last win. Many fail and live lives of quiet desperation behind a professionally smiling facade.

A sales career can be brutal. Delivering revenue is the only thing that protects you, but revenue is an outcome, not an activity.³ Properly qualified pipeline, and lots of it, is required to generate revenue, and a high level of intelligent activity is what’s needed to create pipeline. As a salesperson, the cure of all ills is profitable revenue; lots of revenue is fueled by a big sales pipeline, which also removes the pressure from selling.

“The first commitment to action is to land the first meeting with a dream prospect,”⁴ says Anthony Iannarino. Some argue it’s harder to earn a second meeting, but this book also addresses that challenge. You can read 10,000 other sales books from any era, but their points will be moot if you can’t break through, start a conversation, and then carry the right value narrative. Negotiation—moot. Closing tactics—moot. SPIN selling—moot. So this is a book for solving the fundamental challenge in all sales environments on the planet: getting to the table with the right agenda and narrative. If you open properly, you’ll set the tone on value, earn subsequent meetings, and anchor the deal. Beginnings are important, and first impressions count. The greatest forest is contained in a single seed.

COMBO Prospecting focuses on how to break through and engage a prospect: Call, voice mail and email (all in under two minutes), and consider adding a text message, LinkedIn, InMail, and Twitter DM for initial outreach. Craig Rosenberg from TOPO, along with Jeb Blount, refers to the “triple touch.” They understand the reality that success depends on persistent outreach. The TOPO Sales Development Benchmark Report published in 2014 revealed that 8–12 touches with individuals, not organizations, were needed in a concentrated period for any campaign to be effective. The report also highlighted the importance of driving outreach over multiple channels, including voice.⁵

If you are a seller who can’t land C-level meetings yourself, then you’re not where you need to be to survive, let alone prosper. It doesn’t matter if you’ve read 1,000 books and can recite famous quotes and Challenger theories (CEB) from memory. It doesn’t matter if you can do Miller Heiman ninja black belt histrionic hand motions with a sheaf of gold and blue sheets bristling from your pocket. Knowledge is not power in sales—the devil is in the details. “It’s a paradox of basics,”⁶ says Jeb Blount, author of Fanatical Prospecting, which is my recommended companion for this book—make it the next one you read.

You could be the best listener, be the best asker of questions, and have the tightest sales process and methodology known to man. Without a prospect in front of you, it’s all wasted effort and nothing is going to happen. Reach out and touch someone, preferably with a phone, followed by an email, and then by a LinkedIn InMail or maybe a connection request.

Execution is everything. Bias toward actions, not ideas, will take you the farthest the fastest. Laboring over the perfect email or InMail may seem brilliant, but think of the paradox of relevancy. Michael Jordan spent 10,000 hours shooting three-pointers to become the winningest player ever in the game, and Gretzky’s greatness was built the same way. Likewise, Donald Bradman, the greatest cricketer of all time, practiced hitting a golf ball against a corrugated rainwater tank for hours, using a single stump to hone his hand-eye coordination and reflexes.

Abraham Lincoln said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” We must “sharpen our sales story”⁷ per Mike Weinberg, but once you’ve got it and understand which customers are analogous to your existing customers, go chop down a forest with massive, masterful action. You will read in more detail how to do this in chapters 3 and 4.

You don’t have to overthink it once you have a message that’s resonating the right way in a target vertical. A seller who hits 20 prospects with the most perfectly tailored targeted email in one week will never catch a seller who has a sharp template and calls, voice mails, and emails 50 targets every day. To do this, you must hold these concepts about right action in your mind. Analysis paralysis, procrastination, and perfectionism are ineffective. Thinking that there is some magic bullet that you can put in a social selling message that will get you a meeting or deal is just self-delusion.

There have been many research studies citing that it takes 7–12 touches to land a meeting. The issue really is that you can’t just spam the same message over and over again to achieve those numbers because you’ll be deleted. Enable, educate, and walk your prospect up a ladder of engagement the whole way. Social plays a role but within a holistic strategy. Here is what effective outreach activity looks like: Day 1: COMBO. Day 2: Social engagement. Day 3: White paper. Day 4: A quote by them in social. Day 5: A slideshare. Day 6: A case study.

The essential thing is to absolutely add value to the cadence every time. You can use software such as SalesLoft Cadence or CRM system tasks to ensure that you are staying organized on your touches. You can also just make a manual spreadsheet and add a column next to the account with the contact name and last touch. If you’re only working 50 accounts per quarter, you’ll start to remember every contact that you are mining and get a sense for who the ringleader is and how often you’ve been communicating with them by multiple channels.

What I’ve created here with COMBO is a way to open effectively and consistently with a high degree of prediction. If you select 100 key accounts, you’ll be able to open opportunities with 20 of them in the first two quarters. I’ve road tested these theories with mentees in multiple global markets from California to New York to London to Singapore to Sydney, with companies selling highly disruptive software.

Opening, rather than closing, is the most important phase of selling because it’s binary. It’s akin to doing science without Newton’s first law or acknowledging gravity. It’s like trying to be a fighter but not being able to throw an effective punch. COMBO Prospecting will land a meeting in a down economy, it will land a meeting even if you don’t have a solution yet. Just like boxing, a combination of a kidney shot, rib shot, and uppercut is more damaging than a single punch. Sure, Mike Tyson might throw the hardest punch ever and get a knockout—if it’s landed. But it’s too risky to put all your eggs in one basket. The same goes for prospecting channels because when you pattern-interrupt someone, there’s a flurry of designed activity with flashes of brilliance. But in the context of sales, this technique is anything but hostile; it’s assertive and in the client’s best interest.

Commoditization, increased competition, offshoring, disruption, and the coming of the salesbots mean you must find a way to go to the next level. Professional selling has never been more exciting, yet reaching potential clients has never been more difficult. We live during a time of empowered buyers, distracted audiences, employees who feel entitled, and uncertain economies. Add to this the arrival of the machine age where every industry and every role must be reassessed. They must reexamine how they operate and create the necessary value to fund their very existence. Professional services roles are especially at risk, and white-collar workers, salespeople included, must upgrade their skills to remain relevant.

Everywhere I go, I see silent sales floors and drone armies of passive millennials checking their smartphones hundreds of times per day as they blast Spotify in their ears like social selling whirling dervishes. And to what end? There’s never been a more connected yet disengaged ethos in the history of mankind. Older salespeople struggle as if punch-drunk as they try to embrace the right technologies and automation to drive higher levels of effective activity to save their careers. Many resist customer relationship management systems and sales automation tools when they should embrace both. Few hone the right value narrative and build a strong personal brand that oozes credibility, insight, and value. The old guard often enjoys the support of inside salespeople and loves to use that weekly meeting to school the marketing team on how to build a better value message or marketing program. But truth be told, the most successful senior executives, right up to the CEO herself, will take time out of every day to make targeted outreach calls to critical clients.

I’ve seen CEOs (especially of start-ups) take this too far, micromanaging, acting as frontline seller and client services head, putting together the slides, flying and doing the pitches, and taking over every facet of the organization under the guise of mentorship. Effective delegation is still critical, but that does not mean as a leader of a business, team, or consultancy that you shouldn’t be building out your own targeted lists of prospects. Every CXO should be mining their alumni network and extended contacts and surveying their work history to understand where “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” exists. Wildly, your growth from zero to $10 million and $10 million to $100 million is already living within your social network. If you are a CEO reading this, now’s the time to get started on LinkedIn!

Every CEO should personally embrace LinkedIn, not just have their executive assistant (EA) do it on their behalf. Personal brand on social is table stakes for most start-up leaders, but in the Global 2000 it’s a competitive advantage. Look at Jack Welch of GE or Howard Schultz of Starbucks—they both allow a direct channel from every employee. Employee advocacy is the most powerful PR engine ever invented. Getting the whole organization buzzing about your solution creates what I call a “bee swarm,” causing surround sound for your target. But you can also think about the “thunderclap” technique: one announcement shared by thousands in your company across all social media. The engagement levels are earth-shattering, and your message can go viral.

One of the problems with selling today is that the rise of the silent sales floor is killing business. This book was born to save careers and rescue sales results by creating the right focus, mindset, and culture within the enterprise. Sales is an ancient craft, and it is the engine of every economy. When it comes to personal growth, economic growth, and interpersonal development, quality selling is essential. It’s about face-to-face, human-to-human interaction. It’s about confronting your fears and raising the priorities of C-levels. It is still the people in power who buy, even if they demand consensus before approving the commitment to buy.

Sellers must become experts on delivering outcomes, managing risks, building the business case, navigating politics, building consensus, aligning products and services, and implementing technology and solutions. But sellers don’t get to do any of that unless they can first break through to their customers by harnessing the powers of persuasion and understanding of human psychology. Using these tools intelligently allows sellers to extend their reach and maximize their effectiveness and efficiency.

We’ve all witnessed those top operatives who seem to have a sixth sense and can read people like a book. How do you think they developed those faculties? By clicking the mouse endlessly like cats watching tennis? No, they built that Gladwellian thin slice in the trenches. They grew by boxing their opponents against the ropes. They learned to live by the sword and die by the ramifications of a single gesture. They developed an unbreakable belief in what they were doing and then had the courage to risk failure, embrace the difficult, and learn by doing. With a whisper, they mastered the art of engineering value and consensus and then closing the deal—all with a genuine desire to help their customer.

You must explore the mindset involved in new business development. Yes, you are helping customers find a better future, but you are also being the hunter, taking the kill back to the cave, and nailing the pelt on the wall. In addition to boxing, selling can be compared to professional sports such as baseball or cricket: In baseball, if you hit 3 pitches out of 10, you look like a genius; in cricket, you wait for the one ball in and over that you can hit to the fence. In new business sales, you must be ready to be rejected dozens of times in a row. You can’t take your ego into the office; you need to leave your personal baggage at the door and focus. Successful application of COMBO will include a lot of rejection, and you can’t let this deter you. Expect it and know that you are going to push yourself harder than ever before to break through. Imagine how many times Muhammad Ali got punched before he became the world champion.

This is not a book about theory; it’s a practical manual born from battling in the marketplace. As such, it poses questions whose answers have been proven in the real world. The first question to ask is why is it important to dramatically change the way you sell?

Behold the Stately Honey Badger Who Never Gets Fired

You have to approach sales like the proverbial honey badger. He goes into the mound of fire ants and feels nothing so he can eat. He lets the spitting cobra bite him with its venom, and he passes out but then gets up and shakes it off. He fearlessly climbs to the top of a high tree and bites the head off a mamba snake for a snack. I knew of a salesperson who never used proposals; he simply did discovery and sent order forms. He was nicknamed The Honey Badger for that reason.

The other thing about honey badgers is that they just don’t care and will even attack a pride of lions. Caring too much about closing is anathema in a sale. I’ve heard it called “commission breath” in the industry because it pushes prospects away. The honey badger is fearless and just keeps going regardless of being bit, stung, and tortured. Be the same; keep going until you get to a real “no” so you can report back to your boss that you know for certain that there is or isn’t an opportunity in that account.

You need to hit 10X activity,⁸ according to Grant Cardone. This means going harder, deeper, and wider into your targeted list of accounts so you have certainty in the quarter. It’s simple: You either go get the honey and larvae and kill the cobra or you don’t eat. Cardone was right when he said, “We sell to survive!”⁹

Nick Cummins of Australian Rugby fame earned the nickname The Honey Badger for his fearlessness and full-throttle running and tackling without any regard for his well-being. Some of his famous lines are: “You’ve gotta be tough as woodpecker lips” and “busier than a one-armed bricklayer in Baghdad” and “When you see an opportunity, you’ve gotta go after it like a rat up a drainpipe.”

Opening new business effectively is the most important skill you’ll ever develop. When the efforts of marketing and sales development fail, even if the product-market fit is poor, you can still build pipeline and prove the value of your role and career. It’s almost impossible to be fired if you’re genuinely showing serious revenue potential. Get all your executive team involved in fixing the product and helping you close the sale. At least you will have the opportunity to do so while your colleagues are on the chopping block with no pipeline and dreaded performance reviews. When revenue is down, all hell breaks loose and fingers get pointed, but the honey badger, stately and valiant, stands triumphantly with the honey pot of 3–5X pipeline. That needs to be you.

Extract Your Head from the Darkness; Facts Don’t Lie

All around the world, companies initiate content marketing campaigns and build inside-sales teams for outbound demand generation. Some have even drunk the Kool-Aid and gone full-throttle into social selling, under the mistaken belief that personal marketing on digital platforms is actually selling. They did this with the hope that leads would flood in from the ether. Yes, all salespeople need to market and all marketers need to sell, but the ear-tickling allure of social selling has given many salespeople an excuse for abandoning the fundamental truth of sales performance: You must grab the attention and create meaningful conversations with the people who can actually buy.

The unintended result of social selling for many salespeople is that very little selling is done at all. Likewise, the unintended consequence of account-based marketing (ABM) methods, marketing software, and sales funnel combinations like Marketo is a vast overreliance on marketing to bring qualified inbound leads. ABM is sales plus marketing to drive account-based engagement. Think about C-levels though; they may download a white paper on a Sunday evening, but they probably delegate the insights gleaned to an associate. They probably send in their underlings to research your innovations and watch demos—they simply don’t have time. So by and large, inbound marketing attracts influencers but doesn’t really pull in people who can buy. It doesn’t do much more than cause them to go back to the incumbent supplier to leverage your bid to negotiate more favorable terms.

CSO Insights has written that only 33 percent of a salesperson’s time is spent actively selling,¹⁰ and this observation is supported by McKinsey Global Institute data, which shows that salespeople spend “less than half their day selling.”¹¹ In 2016, I conducted a boardroom roundtable for one of the world’s leading technology companies. I had a 15-minute presentation to stimulate conversation, and I said I believed the majority of B2B salespeople fail to achieve their sales targets over the course of a full financial year. I then put these statistics from 2014 on-screen:

Corporate Executive Board research: 40 percent fail to achieve their sales target.

CSO Insights research: 43 percent fail to achieve their sales target.

TAS Group research: 66 percent fail to hit their sales target.

I could see the skepticism in the body language of every person in the room. “I can sense that most of you don’t believe those numbers,” I said and waited for the reprimand about statistics being fake facts. Instead, one CEO cautiously admitted that it was actually worse in her corporation. Another agreed and said their failure rate was 75 percent, and another said there were always a handful of salespeople who did the big enterprise deals but that almost 80 percent missed or barely fell over the line. They all agreed it was getting worse, with average deal sizes shrinking, decision-makers becoming more distrustful, and time frames blowing out as buyers sought broader consensus before going ahead.

The analysts also agree that the trend is negative for B2B sales performance. Research from CSO Insights increased the failure rate of sellers from 43 percent in 2014 to 56 percent in 2016.¹² A 2016 Harvard Business Review study cited the number of underperforming salespeople at 63 percent.¹³ Objective Management Group reported that three out of four sales-people were failing when they published their findings in the Huffington Post.¹⁴ The statistics are sobering, and the reality is that deal sizes are going down while cost of new client acquisition is going up. There is one inevitable result with these trends—fewer expensive field salespeople and greater reliance on designing customer experience that is supported by relevant content publishing and automation. Design thinking has never been more important as market leaders create awesome customer experience across all channels. Salespeople who fail to move to value and make human interaction the key point of difference will become extinct.

Yet every salesperson and leader can evolve. I’ve been in professional B2B selling for three decades and made tens of thousands of calls. I’ve consistently ranked in the top 5 percent of performers everywhere I worked, I’ve won President’s Club, and I’ve set personal and team records that have never been broken. My determination, cunning, and work ethic have always been the foundation of my success, and I’ve used every ethical tool available to me. The phone remains an integral element of that success, and in the last decade digital platforms have also played an important role.

We must all innovate and adapt. Although it’s never been harder to succeed in B2B sales, it’s never been easier to research and obtain the contact details of buyers. The information and tools we need to thrive are ubiquitous. I believe in social selling, but it must not be confused with social marketing. YouTube is the second largest search engine on Earth, and its hours watched have surpassed even TV. You can make yourself a media brand through YouTube. I’ve had clients come to me via Google searches on subjects as diverse as leadership and The Challenger Sale, because these searches led to my YouTube channel.

Every engagement channel is important because the world has changed, and buyers are harder to reach, more empowered with information, and increasingly stressed, skeptical, and low on time. There is a new reality that many won’t acknowledge—cold-calling alone is a low-yield activity that can destroy morale, annoy potential clients, and even kill a sales career outright. This can be due to overwhelming frustration, rejection, negativity, and day-after-day failure. Chris Beall makes the point that psychologically everyone interprets failure to reach people as rejection—although in truth, it is often nothing more than those people being busy or unavailable. Nevertheless, it takes 18 call attempts to get a business executive on the phone in 2017,¹⁵ which is why sales intelligence and dialing software is essential.

Pounding the phone alone is like charging at the machine guns: It’s not noble—it’s just plain stupid. In 2012, Keller Research Center, within Baylor University, conducted a study of 50 experienced salespeople who combined made more than 6,000 cold calls on the phone over a two-week period. The result was just 19 qualified appointments, and that equates to less than one-third of 1 percent.¹⁶

Yet the phone remains the most powerful tool for truly connecting with a potential client, and it is the next best thing to a face-to-face meeting for creating human connection. But how do you dramatically lift the success rate of your phone calls? Social platforms such as LinkedIn play a huge role because a warm introduction with context and relevance is the shortest path to securing a conversation that creates a qualified prospect. The vast majority of CXOs don’t take cold calls but will always respond to a referral or introduction from a trusted friend or peer.

Every seller needs three to five times their sales target in qualified pipeline, and if you’re not using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator, then you’re asleep at the wheel. Sales Navigator can help you broker an introduction in these ways: identify the key players in a target account, determine how you’re connected in multiple dimensions, monitor and listen for trigger events, leverage your network for intelligence and warm introductions, and engineer multiple engagement points (someone in your company or network who knows someone in theirs).

In your LinkedIn profile, you can evidence your credentials and set an agenda of value. You can head objections off at the pass by publishing content that shows insight; this can attract and engage those who can help you hit your number. LinkedIn research in 2015, externally validated by C9 Inc., revealed that those who use LinkedIn consistently, as validated by snapshots of their social selling index (SSI) scores over time, achieved the following results:

They were 500 percent more likely to secure a meeting with the person being targeted.

They personally had 45 percent more qualified sales pipeline created.

They were 51 percent more likely to achieve sales targets.

Amazingly, these results included those who used the free version of LinkedIn, but those who used Sales Navigator achieved 7X pipeline growth!¹⁷ This was, however, when the free version included the extensive Boolean search feature, which is now available only on the Sales Navigator platform. You should aim for an SSI score in the 80s. Log in to LinkedIn and change the URL to www.linkedin/com/sales/ssi to see yours now.

Creating quality sales pipeline needs to be done intelligently with the seller having context for the outreach. Then the seller needs to provide value in the conversation, rather than seeking to sell value in the form of a product, service, or solution. Research is therefore a key element in targeted prospecting, and the very best use their own CRM system plus Google and LinkedIn for understanding these areas:

The historical interactions and relationships with marketing, sales, service, and support engagements within the target organization

The customer’s industry trends and drivers to understand the competitive market within which they operate

The customer’s specific drivers, initiatives, and performance, along with their key goals, strategies, and initiatives

The highest probability paths for introduction and engagement of the most senior people who make decisions and drive change

It’s important to know what the status quo looks like, and there are always frenemies—even hostiles—in the account, who are loyal to the current state of play or an incumbent supplier. There is software, such as Datanyze and Ghostery, that you can use to get a glimpse into the software platforms the customer is already using. More about how to work with that technology comes later.

Let’s get back to the research numbers, and these may shock you. In 2012, Corporate Executive Board (CEB) published research revealing that 95 percent of buyers expect insight from the seller. It also found that 86 percent of sellers fail to competitively differentiate.¹⁸ Add to this the Forrester research, which revealed that 85 percent of sales interactions fail to meet the expectations of buyers,¹⁹ and you can see that there is a serious problem for the sales community.

Are you awake yet? Ready to lift your game, jump into the ring, and fight for your very livelihood? I’m not saying you need go punch a CEO in the face, but you definitely need to throw a bucket of cold water called insight at the status quo. You need to use “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” combinations and pattern-interrupts. You’re in a marketplace where 999 out of 1,000 do exactly the same thing to reach out to targets with almost an identical message.

How will you stand out and be remembered? It’s a war for “one word brand equity,”²⁰ as David Ogilvy calls it. Mike Bosworth, the godfather of solution selling, says the human mind has about seven slots,²¹ so how can you raise priorities, like Jill Konrath encourages, to occupy a slot in the C-level decision-maker’s mind? Five to 12 poor-quality touches are just spam. But if you are creating value every time, you will break through. COMBO simply allows you to concentrate the touches with speed and accuracy.

Behold the sequence at the corner of the ring in the 1st round versus the 12th: Call, voice mail, video email, LinkedIn invite with custom message, retweet, Facebook chat message, note card, send a book, Starbucks gift card, voice mail follow-up. You can mix and match all of these as needed as long as the phone is the tent pole of the strategy for multichannel engagement of multiple buyer personas across multiple mediums.

“Wow this salesperson is persistent as all get-out, I better hire her” is what you are likely to hear. Trust me, they’ll tell you “no” or offer you a job. That’s what the COMBO seller unlocks. You want to be Rudy playing for Notre Dame. Show some gumption, grit, fire, and tenacity—remind the CEO of how they got started. Take no prisoners, display effort, and tailor your message.

The Great Disruption of Your Precious Livelihood

Commoditization, globalization, automation, and disruption impact businesses and their workers. Hundreds of millions have already been displaced by automation, including: elevator operators, toll collectors, farm workers, manufacturers in the automotive sector, back-office and administrative workers, machinery operators in mining and transport, helicopter pilots, and airline flight engineers. And now the “knowledge professions” are in jeopardy, including those in banking, law, accounting, healthcare—and yes, sales.

Some of the brightest minds on the planet, including Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking, believe that the biggest threat to human existence is artificial intelligence (AI). An amalgam of The Matrix and Terminator is a very real possibility—so much so that Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have launched a nonprofit to ensure that AI is used for social good. For almost half a century, mankind worried it had created the instrument of its own destruction by splitting the atom. We survived the Cold War, but automation and linear computer logic is giving way to genuine self-learning algorithms that will inevitably lead to the Singularity—the moment when AI becomes self-aware. It is projected to occur some time between 2035 and 2050.

What does this mean for sellers? What will happen with the fusion of biology, nanotechnology, and all of human knowledge? Could super-sellers of the future carry chips in their brain with Minority Report–style sensors and contact lenses providing real-time data? The question is whether a human will really be needed at all—wouldn’t an android be sufficient for many transactions?

At the time of this writing, Mark Cuban has backed a start-up with Falon Fatemi called Node.io. The platform identifies a seller’s total addressable market along with the people and company intelligence needed to execute on the right prospects, at the right time, and with the right message. Node acts prescriptively in also recommending the next markets of opportunity for a business, even if they haven’t had historical data. The AI scrapers, algorithms, and big data crunching that goes into their secret sauce can only be speculated upon, but imagine the thousands of human hours that are saved.

Other technologies include Everstring, which is achieving good traction in predictively identifying the right leads. Leadtime also addresses these issues and was founded by one of the fathers of marketing automation, David Cummings, who is also founder of Pardot and now part of Salesforce. There has been an explosion in this area.

Arguably, this techno-magical automation can never have the precision to anticipate butterfly wings starting a hurricane, aka the Ripple Effect. This kind of accuracy can’t happen even alongside an analog sales team of living, breathing humanoids. Yet I’ve seen an AI-driven lead-generation engine doing mass B2B personalized emailing to tens of thousands of companies, and it was doing in just weeks what a sales team of 30 took six months to do. Granted, like Siri, it wasn’t perfect, but the technology will be honed and quantum leaps will happen. You’d believe that with all these tectonic shifts, sales would close faster—but the information deluge and the procurement super-viruses resistant to any strategic selling have created the perfect storm to make enterprise selling harder than ever. In fact, most corporations are working to thin the herd of vendors from many thousands to just hundreds. They’ll bring you in just to run a reverse auction with the incumbent supplier for more favorable terms.

In Terminator 2, a future war rips across the screen as AI decides to rid the world of mankind, which is destroying the planet by depleting all the resources with overpopulation and greed. This storyline is not far from the truth. Self-enabled warbots are already in existence, and a Skynet disaster with AI going rogue is not as far-fetched as you imagine.

But make no mistake. Right now and over the next 10 years, the bots will be coming for your job if you allow yourself to be a mere transactor of commodities. You must move beyond low-value relationship-building and instead elevate every conversation by setting the agenda on insight and value. You must aspire to be your customer’s trusted adviser and earn that position over time by consistently delivering value in every conversation and always acting in their best interest. But you must also harness technology if you are to survive and prosper in the age of the machines and empowered buyers. Technology may be able to crunch big data and blast massive amounts of tailored offers across myriad channels, but it cannot be creative, generate real insight, or build relationships. These are the things that make you the emotional favorite and trusted adviser, which is how you fend off disruption of your sales career.

What is insight? Is it just statistics, case studies, and a history of customer wins? Unfortunately, that’s not enough. In a time when all solutions suffer from the downward pressure of commoditization, and cutthroat vendors undercut the market while touting their spurious ROI claims, skepticism reigns. It is like a Lord of the Flies atmosphere, where sellers can’t be trusted. CXOs are met with a deafening tsunami of empty promises when they open their email in the morning. They stop reading email and have an EA filter and block you. This EA is now running their LinkedIn profile and InMail account. I’ve seen employees whose entire job was just to vet vendors, and I know major Fortune 500 companies that turn down any inbound phone call to the switchboard unless the salesperson has the direct line. The common technique, as used by The Gap, is to have a website just for vendors, and that’s seemingly the only way in.

Consumers and corporate buyers are bombarded with monotone marketing pabulum passing for insight. They face aggressive hoards competing for their attention with a white wall of noise. Yet the very best sellers cut through to become the signal amid the noise; they are the channels that provide value beyond the generic statistics that are being parroted. These winning sellers go deeper than reading an annual report, studying a tweet storm, or searching cleverly on Google. They go beyond to synthesize and process a wide amalgam of data into a cohesive whole. This helps prospects see their business in new ways, and it redefines their paradigm and disrupts their reality.

Ironically, multiple bestsellers have been published on the topic of insight selling, but garnering an insight is much harder than you would think. The best salespeople bring insight to business leaders even if it does not lead to their own solution. The trusted adviser approaches the target with a way to make or save money, create efficiencies, or foster faster innovation that outflanks competitors. Pain is more pertinent than pleasure in order to drive change from the status quo. Saving money is often far more attractive than schemes to grow revenue.

In my first book, The Joshua Principle: Leadership Secrets of Selling, I talked about the three states of business: growth, status quo, or crisis. Sellers approaching tech companies that just raised a war chest of money will often find a business climate of overconfidence. Many companies are plodding along in business-as-usual mode, so they’ll just stick with what they’ve got. The ones in crisis with revenue going down may buy, but then there may be risks associated with credit approval. So all three modes have elaborate challenges to penetrate.

The first state, growth, requires stroking of the ego and showing a path to inflate it even more. The second state requires unlocking latent pain until, as Brent Adamson likes to say, “The pain of same becomes greater than the pain of change.”²² Organizations are laser focused on symptoms, so consultative sellers bring leaders together to triage the underlying problems and mobilize a consensus. If a business is on its way out, make sure you do your research, because you don’t want to close a three-year deal with a firm that goes into Chapter 11 (bankruptcy protection) in six months. Did someone say commission claw-back?

Stu Heinecke is a genius, and everyone should read his book, How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. His ideas on contact marketing are highly creative; he sends out cartoons featuring the prospect. This is so far out of the box that it lands meetings like nothing else. What can a mere mortal do? You probably don’t have time to write blogs, send out cartoons or drones, FedEx printouts with Challenger insights, or hang out in the Atlanta airport hoping to intercept a potential client.

What you can do, right now, is become masterful at using LinkedIn and social platforms for research, monitoring trigger events, and finding the path of highest probability of senior engagement. Smart salespeople leverage their internal CRM and marketing systems and collaborate as genuine team players to maximize the probability of success by focusing on delivering a legendary customer experience. They embrace, rather than resist, technology to assist them with identifying and monitoring trigger events and sourcing referrals.

Research by Craig Elias states that executives new to the job who spent $1 million+ on new initiatives did so within the first 90 days of the job. Therefore, job changes are a key trigger to monitor. There’s a new sheriff in town who is looking to bring in what worked in their last company and to shake up the technology stack in play. Who filled their previous role? Where did your predecessor go? There are actually multiple trigger events contained in the silver lining of any job change because of the domino effect. All of this can be mapped leveraging systems such as Avention and InsideView, plus Sales Navigator. Never sell without Navigator; it’s a living, breathing prospecting database updated by the targets themselves. Doing anything less is flying blind.

Selling has always been about helping people to see and achieve a better state of affairs. Change management is at the heart of achieving this better state. Leaders crave disruption against the status quo, and they have relied on competent sellers for hundreds of years to help them. As much as technology is changing everything, history is also repeating. You are seeing the golden age of connection via the Internet, and social networks create such a preponderance of information that the world’s smartest people are drowning in it. The wild realization is that they’re dying to talk with you—you are a strategic partner who can actually communicate value and make a real difference to their results and quality of work life.

Here is the brutal truth. In order to fund your role, you must move to add value for your employer and customer. If all you do is provide a relationship and information to help someone transact, it’s not enough! No one worth selling to is lonely and looking for a new friend, nor are they bored and hoping a salesperson will enter their day to tell them about the joys and wonders of a company’s products and solutions. Prospects will lie to you to move you off their desk or get you off their calendar. You must press on and press in. You must seek reasons for them to engage and lead with why a conversation matters and what’s in it for them.

In The Joshua Principle: Leadership Secrets of Selling, I published the value quadrant illustration shown in Figure 1-1. To this, I have now added an overlay of the Forrester Research predictions for changes in the number of salespeople by role through to the year 2020. You can see that the top right quadrant is the only place where there is growth.

The point here is that every seller must move to value if they are to survive and prosper. Even before the salesbots could take your career, inside sales, marketing automation, channels, or customer self-service could be the end of you. You must therefore personally create compelling value in the way you operate. This means engaging at senior levels, being consultative, having an insightful point of view, and talking the language of leaders. It means being relevant in helping the customer build a business case, achieve consensus within their team, and manage the risks of implementation. It also means being accountable for delivering tangible outcomes and earning the status of trusted adviser over time. But no human can achieve all of this on their own at the scale required . . . a cyborgian approach is required.

FIGURE 1-1. B2B SALESPERSON VALUE QUADRANT

©Tony Hughes and Andy Hoar at Forrester Research Death of a (B2B) Salesman, April 2015

Cyborg Sellers in the Age of the Machines

The awful truth is that corporations ultimately view us as a unit of production or consumption that must generate a profit for them. Your job is not secure. My opinion is that by 2030, a third of nonretail sales jobs will be gone. The majority of sales development resourcing could be executed by AI algorithms wrapped in cyborg entities. Examples include IBM’s Watson, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Samsung’s Bixby, Salesforce’s Einstein, Nudge.ai, Complexica’s Larry, and Node. All of these examples could evolve to contribute to the rapid android explosion. A series of decision trees from natural language queries underpinned by almost unbelievable amounts of data could be retrieved and processed in the blink of an eye. Kyle Porter from SalesLoft believes, “The best AI vendors are the ones who walk a mile in the salesperson’s shoes and great AI results in better humanity.”

The key here is to become like Iron Man—man with machine—in order to avoid being Terminator career-kill. You are living in a world where Chinese auto assembly lines replace almost all humans, despite those humans being relatively low cost, and achieve compelling efficiency gains and quantum quality improvements.

You are living in a time when automated marketing is replacing salespeople. The most successful car launch in the history of the automobile was the red carpet reveal of the Tesla Model 3 in 2016. Elon Musk live-streamed it, and sent people to his website shopping cart. No showroom salespeople coercing prospects to buy the paint protection package or extended warranty. Just general estimates of range and battery charging times with a promise of order fulfillment starting 15 months in the future. Elon is not even a polished salesman, just an authentic visionary making electric cars cool to own, exhilarating to drive, sustainably powered (the sun or wind charge the batteries). He promises that you can drive it to the SpaceX parking lot for your trip to Mars and that AI will park it when you arrive. The result? Cash deposits of $1,000 paid within 72 hours equating to $14 billion in sales when fulfilled.

Right now, a shopping cart can replace a showroom salesperson, and salesbots are already everywhere when you go online: Amazon, eBay, Google, and even the infamous Ashley Madison website, which allegedly used sexbot algorithms to entice new male members with flirtatious but fictitious women pretending to be interested in an affair. Cheating the cheaters—how ironic.

You may ask, what can I do, I’m just a rep? Well, you have more power than you think. The first thing you must do is realize what is actually happening. To inoculate yourself, you must first think about your own buying behavior. Why would you buy anything sophisticated, complex, or expensive, and what process do you go through to make that decision? Do you feel uneasy, even a sense of fear in the pit of your stomach, with some buying decisions? No robot can take that away. No Svengali AI can mitigate the truth that you’re going to spend a million dollars on a home, for example. You research everything, maybe even for 10 years, to get your ducks in a row.

The sellers of the future will be liaisons of the ultra-complex. They will combine the skills of a solutions engineer with the strategic thinking of a CEO. They will write prolifically, speak publicly, have sensational EQ and IQ, and leverage all the available tools. There’s no replacing charisma and genuine empathy. The history of the brain’s evolution will never be outdone by AI when it comes to the highly analog components of building trust, displaying integrity, and educating and enabling one’s quarry for their own good.

The future of high-value selling, the type you must elevate toward, is humans in partnership with machines as everything converges. Customers want insight and value from every interaction. Creating seamless customer experience that delights the consumer is therefore the panacea of sales and marketing, and it must be delivered with a blend of human relationships and easy-to-use technology, anywhere, anytime, and on any device.

Choose to be one of the few people who will be master of the machines, orchestrating a multiplier effect on the modern sales process. They’ll set appointments, filter through big data for that wow factor insight to hook the skeptical buyer, propensity score your pipeline using a machine learning algorithm that gets smarter, and provide you with data on a heads-up display from a contact lens—ever so Minority Report.

I’ve been rather pessimistic in the past about automation and AI creating a sales career apocalypse, and I’ve recently been converted to believe in a far brighter future for those willing to combine old-school value with new-school technology. Humans who embrace working with bots and leverage advanced technology as they engage prospects and customers will unlock the secret to driving sales pipeline. Then they will progress through to accelerated revenue. Here are three real-world examples of how AI is transforming sales results:

1. Einstein from Salesforce is for integrated opportunity coaching in complex sales opportunities. Einstein is a virtual deal coach who provides predictive lead and deal scores along with opportunity insights, including prompts for the best next steps and methods of outreach. Because Salesforce actually enables and integrates best practice sales processes, Einstein has the ability to monitor critical win factors. Factors it monitors include: whether key information has been obtained, whether the right people have been covered, whether the amount of time in a particular deal stage is damaging the probability of a win, whether frequency of deal updates is on track, and whether the number of calls made and received along with emails sent and received shows proof of high-value engagement.

All of this matters because the level of timely buyer-seller interaction absolutely determines the probability of winning a deal. Unlike a human sales manager, Einstein is always transparently monitoring and providing feedback on which deals need attention and where to prioritize precious sales time. For management, Einstein can deliver the Holy Grail of forecasting accuracy. I’ve seen it and it’s staggeringly accurate.

2. Larry from Complexica is for transactional sales. Servicing a “long tail” of customers with a large SKU range represents a huge challenge for salespeople in terms of investing time in the right areas. Imagine you’re a sales rep working in the wine industry. You have hundreds of licensed premises in your territory, and knowing who is best to call on and what to talk about, beyond your (yawn) specials this month, is a massively difficult thing to figure out. In Australia, the average restaurant or licensed premise has 30 different alcohol salespeople calling every month, along with lots of other suppliers competing for their share of wallet. With 100 or more salespeople banging away at these establishments, no wonder it is so difficult to break through as a salesperson!

Here is the outcome Larry delivers: You are the one and only salesperson the owner looks forward to meeting every month because you provide amazing insights and advice on how they can grow their business and improve the profit! I kid you not. Larry can pull every menu on the Internet from your client’s competitors, analyze the meals on the menus and their pricing (including food that is not sold), and identify the fact that restaurants in the same category within a 10-minute drive have food prices averaging 12 percent more than your client. Your insight (the reason to meet) is that your customer could increase prices by 8 percent tomorrow without becoming uncompetitive. Larry can further provide insights about what types of wine (products you do sell) at what prices could be included or adjusted to improve profit.

Larry, the AI analyst, answers big questions for sellers, and his recommendations drive previously unimaginable sales effectiveness for salespeople. Larry answers questions like this:

In my territory of 300 customers, whom should I prioritize for calls?

When I meet with them, what insights do I have that help their business?

In what order should I plan my calls for maximum efficiency?

Which products should I focus on to maximize our profitability?

The recommendations and call notes from Larry can be pushed automatically into the CRM system. If you operate in a sales environment characterized by frequent transactions with many customers across a large SKU range, and if you’ve read The Challenger Sale and wondered how to generate real insights that actually resonate with the buyer, technology such as Larry could be the answer.

3. Watson from IBM provides natural language dialogue to answer any question as an AI trusted adviser. Natural language is incredibly difficult to deal with for computers, but Watson goes beyond pure logic to cope easily with the nuances, vagaries, and contradictions of the English language. Watson beat the best Jeopardy champions easily, and this occurred back in 2013!

Watson is being applied to medicine to accurately diagnose medical issues, and it is also powering many chatbots. Verbal interaction with truly intelligent computers is a very real part of modern life. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Facebook’s M, Google’s Now, Micosoft’s Cortana, and Samsung’s Bixby are all examples. You’re in trouble if your role in sales is primarily based on answering questions, providing information, and then helping to transact.

Other examples of AI are sales assistants such as Troops.ai with synchronization to Salesforce, and you can even deploy a virtual sales assistant that schedules meetings for you with x.ai. You can leverage big data to crunch all your leads to optimize which ones have the highest propensity to close using Lattice Engines. The rise of “automation of everything,” such as Outreach.io, is transforming the way salespeople work, and SalesLoft goes beyond that to incorporate the human element.

Moore’s Law is relentless, and imagine how the world will change when the AI Singularity arrives. The question of whether humans will be needed in almost all workplace roles will be answered by societal and political considerations rather than by economics or questions over whether a machine can actually do the task better than a human. Bill Gates is already advocating for machines to be taxed (collected by their corporate employers who fired the humans) to fund the universal wage from government for the vast majority of people who will be forced out of work.

As a side note, many people derive their sense of purpose from the work they do. Depression, suicide, and crime are sure to skyrocket as increasing numbers of people lose their careers to the advances of technology. The implications for society are enormous. Questions of purpose and meaning in life have never been more important.

Man the photon torpedoes, and tune your dilithium crystals because Sales 3.0 or even 4.0 is upon us with AI already making its mark. To avoid losing your job in the coming years, you must make insight and value the reason that customers engage with you and build trusted relationships. You must embrace the very technologies you fear in order to harness their power and achieve new levels of capability, reach, efficiency, and effectiveness.

Go Big, Bust Out, and Break Through

The people you are trying to reach and help are facing a barrage of messages every day they come to work. Their inbox is clogged, their calendar is packed, everyone wants their time, and their boss wants results without excuses.

An average buyer receives 100+ emails a day, opens just 23 percent, and clicks on just 2 percent of those.²³ LinkedIn InMails are increasingly regarded as spam. Office phones usually go to voice mail as people race from one meeting to another. Fifty percent of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting.²⁴ A team of 50 salespeople leaves about 1,277 hours of voice mails per month.²⁵ Forty percent of emails are opened on mobile first, and the average mobile screen can fit only four to seven words max.²⁶ Subject lines with more than three words experience a drop in open rate by over 60 percent from shorter subject lines.²⁷

It’s time to dispel the myths. Social selling alone does not deliver, and cold-calling alone does not yield the necessary level of results. In 2007, it took an average of 3.68 cold-call attempts to reach a prospect, and some claim that it took 8 attempts in 2017,²⁸ but Chris Beall suspects these statistics include gatekeeper conversations as “reached.” His own research, based on more than 50 million dials with ConnectAndSell in 2017, shows that it took 18 attempts per connect for real-world lists. In my experience, salespeople make fewer than three attempts.

So how do you break through? First, ensure that you have the right narrative. Every conversation must provide value for the other person. Focus on the outcomes you can help them achieve, and lead with the value you offer rather than with a pitch or value proposition. Have some humility in your approach, yet project your belief in the difference you can make. You want them to think you are someone worth talking to, who can help them achieve their goals or achieve a better way of operating.

Every communication, whether it is email, InMail, voice mail, text message, or the very words from your mouth (when you are surprised by a live voice on the other end of the phone), needs to be about the customer and the business outcomes you believe you can help them achieve. Note: Buying from you is not a business outcome for them.

Unless you’re selling low-value commodities, human-to-human (H2H) engagement is still critically important because people prefer to buy from those they know, like, and trust. The relationships you create are therefore the strongest point of competitive differentiation.

After you have created the right narrative, you need to find the right channels to gain your prospect’s attention and secure engagement. But there is a strange inertia to being human. Most people fear public speaking, probably a bit more than death. Somehow, somewhere along the track, cold-calling became high up on the list of loathsome things. Let’s review general fears in descending order of magnitude: cold-calling, public speaking, disappointing your lover, being fired, death, and falling.

I know that falling is #6 because so many skydivers hate cold-calling, public speaking, and disappointing their lover! The latter drives trillions of dollars of the global economy!

The phone is important because it involves an act of courage. The more you do it, the warmer it gets, the faster the pre-call research, and the more confident you are in every area of your life—not just sales. Automated sales engagement dialers hold salespeople accountable to the action of calling. The best automated dialer solutions provide news and insights about the target account and individual at the moment of dialing. The best dialers are also systems that enable emailing and social outreach. The call with a local area code can increase call connections by 21 percent, according to a study conducted by SalesLoft that measures the performance of 1 million calls.²⁹ SalesLoft is a market leader for capturing sentiment and disposition during calls. Most important, automated dialers build courage by shoving you into the fight cage and locking the door from the outside.

Facing your fears is a beautiful thing. Overcoming your fears and your ego is the biggest breakthrough you need to make if you are to truly succeed in sales. There is an amazing liberation that comes from not caring anymore about what people think.

Nevertheless, rejection sucks and so inbound selling systems have become a panacea for the sensitive masses. I’m here to tell you that you want to be a bit extreme as a seller. You want to embrace not just a high volume of activity, but activities that are heavily fear-based that you can turn into an unlimited sword of power.

Be the extreme person on your team who is breaking ice, opening conversations, and doing what’s uncomfortable. You can leverage social platforms in this way also, by sticking to the value and going beyond the fluff. Never blast and spam your network with sales messages or publish anything that is inconsistent with your employer’s brand.

If you’re not in a state of fear when you go sell today, you’re not pushing hard enough or taking the actions that will enable you to truly excel and exceed quota. Make no mistake, everything you are doing is to avoid being fired.

Friending everyone and seeking to be a people-pleaser will not make you a trusted adviser. And you shouldn’t grasp your way up the ladder via politics because it just makes you a lesser person. You can instead earn credibility by doing what’s assertive, hard, and courageous. Fortune will always favor the bold. As Lee Bartlett says, “If you can pick the phone up to 10 C-level execs and chew the fat, nobody is firing you and everyone wants to hire you.”³⁰

Only the strong will survive, and only those who give their all benefit from the law of reciprocity. I’m encouraging you to hunt. You can’t feed the tribe without bringing back the kill and putting the pelts on the wall. You cannot harvest a crop without laboring in the soil and sowing the seed. You cannot achieve greatness with vapor. You must be committed to the hard things. So many salespeople are half-assing, and managers are even worse—literally unwilling to do the prospecting. Are you a CEO or GM or SVP? If so, I’m encouraging you to prospect by phone after doing some research and preparing with the right narrative. The best ones do because they lead by example.

The number-one problem for salespeople across the globe is lack of sales pipeline—yet that’s a symptom rather than a root cause. The real problem is an aversion to using the right combinations of intelligent activities that are required for sales success. After you’ve done quick, pragmatic research, pick up the bloody phone! Call their cell phone, leave them a voice mail, send them an email. Then follow up with a text message and InMail. Jab, jab, jab, jab, jab—two minutes and you’re all done. Move on to the next person on your list—the list you researched and created, ready to go, before you left work the previous day.

Anthony Iannarino, Mike Weinberg, and Jeb Blount all advocate the use of time-blocking to maximize efficiency. Lock yourself away for a minimum of one hour at a time to hit the phone in prime time, 7:45 a.m. to 8:45 a.m., before the day consumes your prospects with endless meetings. Leveraging multiple outreach channels rather than using the phone alone will dramatically increase results, but only if you have the right narrative built around insight and value for the buyer, well in advance of them becoming your customer. If you deliver the right message, what will they think as alerts ding away on their cell phone? “Wow, this person is seriously determined.” Go beyond social selling, and think digital selling. Harness all the tools available combined with your own value narrative and Wile E. Coyote determination and cunning.

Here is the smartest way to build quality sales pipeline: Interview your most successful customers to find out what happened inside their organization that led them down the path to buying your solution. Dig deep to discover:

What trigger events should you listen for?

What problems should you be looking for?

What does a dream potential client really look like?

Finding alignment is better than evangelism, but to secure high-yield warm introductions you must first do your research. But do it quickly. Whether you’re upselling existing clients, securing referrals for warm introductions, turning cold calls into warm calls with pragmatic research and vertical industry relevance, you must create your own authentic combinations of insight, value narrative, techniques, and tools to break through, storm the barricades, cross the moat, and jetpack your way into the ivory tower of the executive buyer’s gold-plated private suite. Yes, that was the longest sentence in the book.

Seriously, you must find a way to break down the barriers and cut through the stress of your customer’s day, and it must be authentic for you. Tools alone are not the answer. Just as with every hit song and movie, there are repeated combinations that are refreshed by producers to make them familiar, interesting, and relevant for their audience. You must stand out in a really cool way, which is why this book discusses the hottest one at the bar analogy.

Winning Combinations of Old and New

Like in metallurgy, the blended steel alloy is the hardest and cuts the sharpest—you must bring the essential elements together with other elements. COMBO Prospecting defies the dismal statistics and gives you double to triple the cut-through when applied. It’s simple and works in any market, any vertical. The phone is its tent pole. It’s blended prospecting spiked with a new twist—concise combinations that will cause a prospect to instantly remember you and respond. You can get 100 voice mails in a row—it still works. You can never once reach a prospect—it still works. You can feel at peace with your day because meetings will get set at any level in the organization, especially the power base of VPs at the C-level.

The prerequisite for jumping onto the phone or sending an email is to have an authentic narrative nailed, and the next chapter deals with this in detail. Just like a boxer invests thousands of hours practicing the basics—jab, jab, duck, right hook—it must be instinctive. I learned karate and went to the world championships, and I came away with a bronze medal in my division (middle-aged fat men well below black-belt level). In competition, I learned something interesting about my rigid form of martial art. It was high on disciplined katas, which limited you in the real-world heat of battle. It was too predictable with little improvisation. Mash-ups and combinations are what create unique advantage, in sport and life, but only if you can own your form and authentically execute with instinctive passion. Think MMA cage fighting or hapkido.

Leverage timeless truths, but also be innovative in engagement and execution. People still buy from those they know, like, and trust. People desire with emotion and proceed with logic. Successful sales conversations are driven by insight and value creation. The name of the game is human-to-human personalized marketing and outreach done at scale, while also leveraging technology and social platforms. What’s amazing to me is the binary nature of the debate—two camps have formed: no tools or all tools. Social or the phone. These are false dichotomies.

Fighters will tell you that courage and skill is just a ticket into the ring or cage. Boxing is a game where strength and speed can only be a competitive advantage when fighting within the usual rules. In the octagon, jiu jitsu upsets this balance. It’s a grappling ground game where a frail Gracie could take out a lion of a man three times his size.

There’s something to be said for social aikido, which leverages the aggression of one’s opponent against them. Similarly, there is a violence to selling. It is a rejection-laden lifestyle, but you will only truly fail if you allow defeat to enter your heart. If you enter the ring thinking about the last uppercut to the jaw you took, it will upset your chi and you will fail desperately. For all of these fighting techniques, winning depends on power, speed, accuracy, and attitude . . . and so does the art of selling.

Success in sales requires a simple, fundamental COMBO that is concise and hard hitting. The human attention span is about seven seconds, very much like that of Dory the fish. Simply call, voice mail, and email—on message and as fast as you can. An entire triple, as this is called, should be performed in less than two minutes. Once you get really good at this, you can do it in 90 seconds. Every day, you should execute a minimum of 30 triples, which can be achieved at scale in less than two hours. You should be carving out at least one two-hour prospecting block every workday, and you need to work 50 target accounts per quarter with three to five contacts per account, with at least two of these being C-levels.

You’ll need the right tools to execute this effectively:

LinkedIn Sales Navigator (make the commitment and buy this)

Sales data intelligence tools (buy these also, just like the tradesman who buys the best power tools)

Cadence and dialing software, which enables integrated phone, email, and social engagement (your employer will need to invest in these)

A bullwhip for your sales manager to use on you if you don’t make the calls

After field-testing 30 COMBOs per day all over the world, I know this will create 3X pipeline within two quarters. You may be thinking that you’ll drown in your own pipeline . . . fear not! The best prospects will throw you a lifeline by selecting themselves for your attention. You can even compress the ramp to success from 180 days to 90 days by monitoring for trigger events and leveraging referrals in Sales Navigator. This uses the concept that you can tap into your own team’s connectivity to the prospect base, and I’ll talk more about this in later chapters. Other types of COMBOs include:

Referrals: You call the connection in common, send them an email, and even go meet them in front of their office. You’ll notice the way I stress personal connection.

Screenshot: You take a screen capture of your LinkedIn InMail and send it as an email with “Mary, your thoughts?” in the subject line. This COMBO is based on the fact that professionals actually check their profiles so infrequently.

Sheer brute force: This includes increasing the channels and frequency.

Ninety-three percent of converted leads are engaged on the sixth call attempt.³¹ I want to storyboard why the COMBO core technique is so powerful. Executives are busier than ever; in fact, I read that the average CMO gets 1,700 emails per month. CXOs have assistants who check their email and shunt many into a black hole to eliminate solicitors. The average worker receives over 200 emails a day, with many siphoned off into a corporate spam filter or junk mail folder. I’ll explain how to avoid those filters later, but rule #1 to avoid the spam filter is not to send emails through a marketing automation commercial server. These are recognized and blocked immediately.

So imagine if you’re a C-level decision-maker (the one who owns the problem you want to solve) in a Fortune 1000. The phone rings, and you immediately ignore it because the caller is not in your address book. Then you get a notification that the caller has left a voice mail—you ignore it. Then a text message with an intriguing message and an email regarding the call and message they left. Then you see a LinkedIn request that’s customized with relevance to you. You think, “My beeper is melting down, Batman!” Do you see how the salesperson is bee swarming or surrounding you? The next day, they might get a referral to you, or they may triple again—call, voice mail, email.

To be prioritized, you must raise the bar, move to the front slot, à la Bosworth, and consistently be the buzzing in their pocket. Most will finally take the meeting out of sheer curiosity, guilt, or—get this—outright respect for how hard you hustled. Displays of sheer grit and tenacity are fleeting in our modern society, and this is why professional athletes are so admired. The world loves the violent determination of UFC, boxing, ice hockey, and full contact sports without the pads like rugby and Aussie Rules football. Why do you think that is? Powerful people pay through the nose for box seats, booths, and exclusivity to see these modern gladiators compete. They know their stats, and they perform the same plays ad infinitum until their COMBOs are precise and uber-powerful.

Every elite athlete, businessperson, and seller is at the top because of their unbelievable levels of commitment and hard work. Talent is just the ticket to compete for a spot on the bench. Your gift of gab is a handicap in sales. Focus on hard work, teachability, and determination. Boxing is a science of training the body to shift weight to hold, block, and respond in ways that aren’t natural. By grooving these moves in 10,000 times, they become second nature. When you practice, drill, and rehearse, you can attain an unconscious competence, similar to learning to drive.

If I were to hand you a primer on old-school selling techniques, would you dismiss them or embrace them? Do you truly understand the power of having passionate curiosity about your customer and acting with positive intent? Do you know the importance of politics and how to navigate the competing agendas within organizations? Have you heard of Neil Rackham, Jim Holden, Miller Heiman, Jeff Thull, Keith Eades, or Mike Bosworth? You need to go read every single book by these people to understand that history repeats itself and effective foundations don’t change. Technology and access to information can both collapse time in the sales cycle and blow it out as buyers are paralyzed by choice. They can become discombobulated by an overload of information and an inability to achieve consensus within their own teams.

You need to move faster and leverage winning combinations that separate you from your competitors. Anyone can spend three weeks writing the Holy Grail of prospecting emails. But there will still be that rep who out-scores you: call, voice mail, call again, call again, message, email, InMail, video email, text message, Twitter DM, social share, social add, retweet.

You only ever have one objective, which is to get that golden “no.” Burn out that lead, and celebrate the fact that they won’t be wasting any more of your precious time or allowing false hope! You’ll be free to focus where there is real potential. If there’s any interest, or if the prospect is actually in a buying window, you’ll uncover it. If they are a market fit for your product, service, or solution, but the timing is wrong, put them in your CRM so “the machine” can lead-nurture with drip marketing. You’ll be prompted to get back in their face again at least 90 days before they will be considering going to market for what you sell.

I’d rather hit 50 accounts and open two or three fully qualified enterprise opportunities than whittle away at 50 accounts just to be left with dust in the pipeline. If you want to rise above the pack, make a commitment to shine bright and treasure your time. You won’t have to euthanize your brand—you’ll simply keep at it until you get the answer you deserve. You’ll put 50 rounds in the chamber and prepare to shoot. Are you ready for full metal jacket, to get rejected hard, to get hung up on, to hear “no”? That’s the gig. That’s how you’ll make over a million bucks a year while a Harvard MBA is schlocking around in five-figure land. Risk = reward.

Now I’m not setting up a Glengarry Glen Ross (classic movie about sales) scenario or zero-sum game. I’m making a case that courage is the fuel of champions and one of the most important virtues to cultivate. You’ve got to be a duck and let all possible negativity slide right off your back. Just like a volley of misplaced punches results in you getting hit back, you’ll make mistakes and learn from the pain. Precision will come over time.

Could it be that you need to cold-call like Donald Trump? “Making sales great again!” Ouch, I said it. Legend has it Donald Trump doesn’t use email, a port in the storm of a litigious world. He clearly tweets prolifically. I can guarantee you he has a gold-plated rotary phone in the commode where he makes it all happen. I get a real kick out of visualizing him as the SVP of Sales running a cloud SaaS company. Just imagine it: blowtorch in one hand and megaphone in the other, telling everyone in his own unique way that the market potential is “youuuge,” and you’ve gotta deliver results or “you’re fired.”

But that’s enough about The Donald. I want to anchor this playbook with how to open meetings with impossible-to-reach prospects. Yes, the ones you wish you could talk to but never actually do. Here we go.

Blooding Your COMBO Strategy

You are not in control of your customer. The funnel is not linear; it’s an infinite loop or a Möbius strip, as Nic Read says. You can, however, control yourself, your own actions, and your emotional responses. COMBO, or Command Over Maximizing Business Opportunities, means you can control your output with smart daily activity. You can control your attitude and responses to the chaos that ensues. You can take furious levels of smart action until, like a tidal wave, you have an abundance of new business opportunities that are so rich and so promising that you can be in command over your role, your company, and your dream customer.

Thirty triples a day keeps the performance improvement plan (PIP) away. Once again, a triple is 1) calling, 2) always leaving a message, and 3) always sending an email—all within two minutes. Blindingly simple! The first time you execute outreach with a new prospect, you could include an InMail, phone text message, and/or direct message in Twitter to make it a quad, pent, or sextet.

Use COMBO with a call to at least 30 people per day. It’s paramount that you have direct dials, and you can use RainKing, DiscoverOrg, Data.com, Lusha, Hunter, Rapportive, Discover.ly, Seamless.ai, or others to easily source email addresses and cell phone numbers so you’re not snafued in switchboards all day or limited to InMail within LinkedIn.

Never leave the office until you have the next morning all set up with a list of people you’re going to call. Time-block two hours every morning, and start calling while your prospects are driving to work. Call cell phone numbers and direct office lines. Senior people get started early. You want to be well into your list before your snoozer colleagues or your boss walks into the office. Be the first salesperson in the office every day!

Pick 50 key target accounts (KTAs) per quarter. If your CRM won’t support the process, build a Google spreadsheet you can share with your manager. Select three to five target people per account, and ensure that at least two are C-level.

Go into LinkedIn Sales Navigator (required!), and save these contacts as leads within accounts so you can monitor for trigger events (news they share, job changes, funding, pain, etc.) in the Navigator stream. The best CRM software, such as Salesforce, has integration with Navigator, and this is transformational for sales productivity.

Each day after work, maybe as you travel on public transportation, focus on things such as liking people’s status updates in the Navigator mobile app. This is fundamental to never making a cold call again because you become someone familiar when you engage your prospects on social media.

What do you say, live or with a voice mail message, when you make a phone call? Mike Weinberg does a phenomenal job of helping you “sharpen your sales story” in his must-read book, New Sales. Simplified. The key is to only talk in terms of business outcomes you’ve helped others achieve. If you have quantified ROI, that’s even better—but be careful with grand claims, as buyers are increasingly skeptical. Each message should be no more than 30 seconds. When sending an email, the subject should be just a few words and the body text should never exceed four sentences—smart-phones and executive ADD make this essential! More on crafting your value narrative is covered in the next chapter.

Never forget that a referral is the fastest path to revenue as it leads to the highest probability of a sale. That’s because of the timeless power of trust. Make referrals a priority and something that is always top of mind for you—always ask! Sales Navigator reveals referrals like nothing else, but call the people who can provide an introduction rather than clicking a button online. This is key: If you have a connection in common, don’t just send a LinkedIn message. Always, always, always call for the referral, explain why it’s relevant, offer to ghostwrite the introduction, and if you can, get the mutual connection to even get your prospect on the phone. This is how you reach the unreachable.

There is a crazy high close rate when using LinkedIn TeamLinks. This is an advanced feature in LinkedIn Sales Navigator where you can understand (at a glance) who in your company knows someone in the prospect company. Again, call your colleague on the phone to ask for the introduction. Some of your greatest TeamLinks, if selling technology to high-tech companies, will be your internal engineering team. Talk about street credibility!

Now I know what most of you may be thinking at this point: What if my managers or the powers that be are Luddites or sticks in the mud? They refuse to bankroll LinkedIn Sales Navigator or “pricey” sales tools. Are you out of luck? No.

You can manually build a list of switchboards that are available and start to write down the appropriate keys to dial by name if they have an automated directory. You can guess email conventions and reverse look-up email addresses with a free browser plug-in, such as Rapportive or Discover.ly.

You can leverage the “neighborhood technique,”³² where you call an executive assistant from the switchboard. Let her know you’re in town the week after next and just want to have a short meeting to discuss trends, use cases, or best practices. Better still, call the target person’s cell phone direct, and adopt an assumptive close for the meeting en route. Simply sort your LinkedIn or CRM contacts by city and start executing COMBOs, saying that you’ll be in the area. Shoot for coffee and watch how many accept and bring colleagues. Stay the course and email again 48 hours before and then the morning of the meeting to confirm the scheduled time. Relentless follow up will ensure that in a two-day trip, you have five meetings. Now that’s pipeline, face-to-face! “Chuck, I’m literally just five minutes away. Why not grab a quick coffee?”

The critical point is that an effective combination of prospecting methods hinges on the phone as much as possible. Frequently, you can send a personalized LinkedIn InMail and then search their “ways to contact” section to pull a cell phone number. You can Google search their name or email address. All of this is currently free, and once you send a bunch of emails over a holiday weekend, you can collect direct cell phone numbers from their out-of-office auto-responses. One of the best tactics is contacting people who left an organization for the direct email and phone numbers of contacts still there.

It’s just like golf—there is no point blaming the clubs if you can’t master the fundamentals and hit the ball. Equally, even if you have competence, a $400 driver is not going to make you Jason Day. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Start to move the needle with calling, and then build a business case for your direct manager to invest in the newfangled tools, starting with Sales Navigator.

Why Savvy Social Sellers Still Call Like Crazy

The year of the sales stack was 2017, and 2018 sees AI sales assistance maturing. If you want to be one of those who thrive rather than fade, then choose to be assisted by AI to engage with prospects and customers with your actual voice, not just your fingers! Find the best combinations to create human-to-human conversation, leveraging your dulcet tones and your alluring insights.

Have you ever noticed that top performers don’t see channels or tools? They just connect, whatever it takes and no matter what. They get to the target. They get on-site and in the arena (just like Anthony Iannarino’s podcast). The best thing that can happen to you is live human interaction. Everything else is going through the motions—a massive waste of time or something that the salesbots can do.

Amazingly, in some ways, selling hasn’t changed a bit in a hundred years, and it won’t be much different toward 2020. At least, not for those who succeed at it. Thirteen percent of sellers are generating 87 percent of the business,³³ and you want to be in that camp! It’s simple if you follow the harsh advice I’m going to give you.

The achievers will always overcome their fear of rejection, aka picking up the phone, because they know the importance of talking to a live prospect or leaving a real voice message. I’ve talked to so many about this, and there’s really no debate. It’s empirically proven by the conclusive feedback I’ve received from more than 1,000 posts and articles from 2016–2017: The top salespeople are still fearlessly calling—intelligently warm calling.

The best leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator and their CRM system to assess referrals and targets in their key accounts the night before. They then make direct dials to hit 30 targets every day. What separates the successful seller from the mediocre one is not some elaborate engineering of sales technology stack or social selling mastery to pump out content. Successful sellers just relentlessly and intelligently call! This is getting repetitive here, but are you actually going to do it?

As Jeb Blount so eloquently puts it, “It’s a paradox of basics.”³⁴ Or as Lee Bartlett phrases it in his book The No. 1 Best Seller, “Get punch drunk on the phone.”³⁵ Mr. Miyagi didn’t go right into third-degree black-belt level katas in the first scene in The Karate Kid. He started with “wax on, wax off.”

This is the paradox of all sales. At the very top level of professional selling, the leaders are picking up phones and, since “brevity is the soul of wit,” leaving concise unique value propositions (UVPs) on voice mail or interrupting prime prospects every day. This action is going to work exponentially in your favor as more and more salespeople drink the snake oil of passive social selling.

More and more target prospects have cell phones, and many will own two (as those who adopt the practices in this book increasingly break through to their cell numbers). Millennials: Now is your chance to buck the trend and call cell phones all day. You will advance your career as your snoozer colleagues are replaced by the bots or fired for nonperformance.

We’ve reached peak social selling, ironically at the precise moment we’ve reached peak cell phone penetration in the prospect base. The opportunity is vast for the courageous. Be bold! Be a bull breaking fine china! Pick up the phone. Make sure you have the data you need to directly dial. Call prospects that scare you. Call the people that make the decision first. Start high and get sponsored down, rather than going for those in your comfort zone who will become blockers to executive engagement. Don’t research all day or overthink it; ensure that you have the right narrative by leading with why the conversation matters, and never mention your product, service, or solution. Go out there and get in front of them, and you will be mystified by how the numbers start to work in your favor.

Here are some muddy statistics that sales cowards hide behind:

Ninety percent of C-levels don’t answer the phone. It’s a small survey, and it’s wrong. Many CXOs were once sellers and will accept a valiant, professional effort to reach them. Bank on it!

They are 57–70 percent through the buying process (CEB Research vs. Forrester Research). Yes, they have Google, but they are crazy busy and you can trigger them into a buying window with finessed interruption. Change the goalposts. You’ve got to uncover latent pain, and I guarantee you that sending smoke signals and passive noise is not going to get a slot. Go and poke the bear!

84 percent of new business is being generated by referrals. Again, this statistic is simply not true; in the main, those are internal referrals generated by savvy cold callers who have leveraged social engineering to do the triangulating and targeting. If the CMO flicks your email to the CEO, bingo: internal referral. This data must be debunked!

By the way, if you doubt any of the stats in this book, rest easy because 74 percent of stats are made up, including this one,³⁶ say Jeffrey Gitomer and Jennifer Gluckow. Seriously though, all of my stats have been obtained from reliable sources. Bogus stats have been torn to shreds by my hundreds of thousands of blog readers and never made it into this book.

I hope this is giving you a lot of hope and causing fists of lightning and fire in your belly. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s called back to basics. Think about how Rocky used to train for boxing matches to become the world champion. Pulling heavy things in the snow, chasing chickens, drinking raw eggs, doing push-ups with a horse cart filled with boulders and children, punching sides of beef in the freezer room . . . you need to do all this to win.

You can do it all with LinkedIn and a phone, plus a few other simple tools. Amp it up by leveraging an intelligent blended approach. If you’re cruising along in sales just clicking away at the mouse, then you’ll fail. There will never be an easy button on sales success. Social is mainly for quality marketing and brand building; social selling is a crucial component of “whatever it takes,” but it’s not enough on its own. I hate to burst your bubble, but real A+ selling should strike terror in your heart: You can only win by talking to qualified prospects as often as possible, and you must elevate the conversations.

The Lunacy of Cold-Calling vs. Social Selling

This is a false dichotomy. It’s warm-calling and social selling—social research, social listening, personal brand building, social collaboration, and social marketing, to be accurate. The term social selling is really an oxymoron. I prefer the term digital selling. Call it whatever you want; just make sure you combine social and the phone to drive real human conversations.

Salesperson: “Cold-calling doesn’t work; it’s a really poor use of my time.” My response: “You should be warm-calling instead; it’s just intelligent cold-calling by another name. If you can’t make conversations happen on the phone, then you won’t be successful.” This was a real exchange.

You need to be a master of new-school and old-school methods to have a fighting chance of success in sales. Let’s do some math that The Donald himself would embrace:

1. Out of 100 cold calls, you’ll connect with 2 or 3. Dismal. Let’s therefore dismiss the phone altogether . . . wrong!

2. Buyers are five times more likely to engage if there is a warm introduction.³⁷ True, so let’s go full bore in social . . . also wrong!

3. COMBO drives two to three times the responses. Behold the triple: call, voice mail, email (in under two minutes) . . . getting warmer. And this is just the beginning!

The bottom line is that channels are never mutually exclusive in their efficacy. Just like combination therapy in skincare or high-intensity training in fitness, a blended approach is required. With the third path above, you’re looking conservatively at six to nine connections out of 100 calls, which is much better than number 1.

Now if you get a warm referral from inside the organization on one of those connections, you are five times more likely to close, based on number 2. If you do the math, you have a 40 percent higher likelihood of opening an opportunity on a 100-call prospecting session, which is about a single morning of triples. You’re looking at setting one meeting in four hours versus opening one qualified opportunity every day or 48 hours. You need only about three qualified discovery meetings per week to build out 1.5–3X pipeline over two quarters.

So that’s the secret math and it’s simple. You can fully ramp like this without being at the mercy of someone else to create your leads. Sales development reps (SDRs), also referred to as inside sales reps (ISRs) or lead development reps (LDRs), should themselves be adopting COMBO Prospecting techniques. Focus all your time at work on revenue-producing activities.

You may be reading this and thinking that you need much higher volume, conversion from calls to meetings, and then opportunities converted to hit your number. That’s why you need very strict criteria about whom you call. Qualifying systems such as BANT (budget, authority, need, and time frame) or HubSpot’s GPCT (goals, plans, challenges, timeline) qualification framework come in handy. More on qualification and discovery later, but it’s critical that you get in high and qualify-out correctly based on budget, timeline, compelling event, and success criteria. You must be extremely protective of your time and capture those who are not in the right window into your CRM for high-quality content-based lead nurturing. Be very careful not to allow your future prospects to be blasted with spam from your company!

Spam annoys potential customers, and social selling is also aggravating when they receive friend requests from a stranger. Social networks abound with noise, and buyers don’t want any more friends! The majority of people in power are drivers who want to get to the point and engage on the basis that you can actually help them achieve one of their wildly important goals.³⁸

If you sell to CIOs, you must acknowledge that only a small minority would probably qualify right now. The vast majority are a) not interested, b) not in the buying window, c) just signed with a competitor, or d) most likely just happy to do nothing (status quo). The reason triples work is that you’re “qualifying the buying window,”³⁹ as Jeb Blount states. If you’re selling SaaS, chances are you’re being commoditized and facing stiff competition. You need to move exceptionally fast to a “no” to even understand if there is a need or if you should create one upstream of the buying process.

Pattern-interrupt is one of the reasons COMBO Prospecting works. The majority of sellers follow up by email just twice. If you show up knocking on the CXO’s door, chatting up multiple EAs, sending over several white papers and YouTube videos, building a quantified ROI-based business case, and touching their organization a dozen times a week in relevant, customized ways, then you’re going to rattle the tree and the forbidden fruit will fall off.

The decision-makers who can buy your products and services are starving for insight, and you must be the signal in the noise for them. They’re bombarded constantly by inanity, so the first person to pattern-interrupt and knock some sense into them—laser focused on how they’ll actually make or save money—will be a refreshing change and will even be prioritized.

The COMBO of social and the phone is game changing. Special thanks to Steve Jobs—may he rest in peace—for creating the first genuinely mobile COMBO tool. But an amateur with expensive tools is still ineffective; you must become a masterful tradesperson.

Blended prospecting approaches are nothing new; they are just rare. But they have been previously highlighted extraordinarily well by Jeb Blount, Mike Weinberg, Anthony Iannarino, and others. Lee Bartlett, from London, used these combination techniques when seeking a meeting with the highly influential Jeffrey Hayzlett from New York. Lee saw a tweet from Jeffrey saying he had landed at Heathrow Airport (trigger event) and immediately tweeted a public reply, followed by a personal message offering to meet anywhere. As soon as Jeffrey responded, Lee called. Within 24 hours, they were face-to-face talking business over breakfast.

Social selling gurus have recoiled in horror at me pushing the phone, but the truth is that we’re embracing their methods, too. I’m just making the argument that the previous techniques are just as relevant as ever. The human voice must be central. Mixed martial arts provides the best analogy. It’s a ground game of grappling if you take away strength and speed. It’s a game of social aikido or tai chi where one can use the opponent’s own energy and weight against them. Metaphorically, your competitors are actually making your job easier, creating a layup for someone who’s actually delivering real strategic value.

Selling is a full-contact sport and really only gains traction with human conversation where there is insight and rapport. Success happens face-to-face, even if it’s video conferencing with GoToMeeting, Skype, BlueJeans, appear.in, Zoom, or something else. You’ve got to learn effective “smart calling” with Art Sobsczak and how to sharpen your “sales story” with Mike Weinberg before you go and apply these same communication tactics on other mediums. Without a value proposition delivered to an ideal client profile (ICP), you’re dead in the water no matter what the channel.

Why Being Beat Up Is Good for the Soul

Intelligent calling to generate business is good for the soul. It’s humbling, scary, and highly rewarding. Sales is about real communication, and I believe we need a massive return to innocence. Why call? Literally, face your fears and call a stranger. When is the best time? Right now! Any day that ends in y is good for calling, and any time that they are not with their family is good for calling. People obsess over making the perfect scripted call at the perfect time of day to the perfect prospect as if they’re about to get in an elevator with Mark Cuban and get 10 seconds to pitch. Mark Cuban ran a college bar, and if he had to start all over, he would be the master of . . . wait for it . . . cold-calling!

If you just master that one skill of cold-calling, and then add pragmatic research and COMBOs to warm the calls beforehand, your entire career will be transformed from the inside out. Focus all your energy on developing this one mental muscle for six months, even if you talk to only 2 in 100 people. Watch your self-esteem, income, and influence take off like a rocket ship! You’ll develop the COMBO Prospecting habit for life.

If you’re serious about calling, you could utilize ConnectAndSell and get those contact rates through the roof. Just ask Chris Beall, who lives life at 1,000 dials a day. I’ve affectionately nicknamed Chris Bruce Wayne because he is the Dark Knight of our social selling–crazed digital age. Chris drives 40 live prospect conversations per day, per salesperson. Like Batman, Chris Beall is cleaning up Gotham of charlatan jokers who push their social selling schlock to the masses by fear-mongering and who are petrified to be human and authentically communicate. There has been a vast trend, which borders on obsession, of checking mobile devices hundreds of times a day. Being a screen jockey is an introverted activity and not natural or healthy for the human brain or body. You see couples at fine dining restaurants immersed, heads down on Facebook (always Facebook) or Instagram. You see it on the train—the endless swiping of meaningless magazine drivel, living vicariously through some celebrity’s shallow excuse for an existence.

What is sales really? What defines success? Sales is about communicating with others and making a positive difference in their lives. It is about saving people from failure and helping them see, and then achieve, a better state of affairs so they can soar. It goes beyond fear of the phone. Maybe you fear something deeper—like someone discovering you’re full of hot air. This fear is endemic to a virtual society of isolation where no one knows anyone anymore. Our whole waking lives are constructed with the selfie-stick and the humble brag, a Jenga game of polished glass ready to shatter at the sound of a human voice.

The purpose of social media like Facebook and LinkedIn was always to connect. This is a call to arms for everyone to just be real and move from being connected to being truly engaged. When I’m reaching out to people, I reach out to the ones I truly believe I can help. My positive intent and my belief in what I offer is a port in the storm of rejection. This rain of rejection slides off me like water off a duck’s back as I paddle like crazy under the surface to get my activity up to the point that I can break through. I don’t use wooden scripts or canned responses: I intend to break through by being real, and so I do.

We are spirits in a material world on a quest to drive value by actually interacting. We need to break down the barriers and really get to know each other; break bread and show vulnerability; and release fears, bias, and divisions to build a better society and world. I think that the real dinosaur concept is the idea that you can sit in front of a computer screen, clicking away passively, and call it sales. Used in this way, social becomes a misnomer. In sales, social is like a fleeting meme that has passed us by.

Many say that managers of millennials should not push them to get on the front foot. But that’s just like bad, permissive parenting, where your kid loves you and then goes to join a street gang at the tender age of 13. Millennials would rather have a smartphone than a car. They should take the car and go meet other millennials for a hike in the wilderness. Sales roles should be 70 percent real human interaction on the phone or in the field. You could easily dismiss me as a Luddite or iconoclast, but this is just level one: wax on, wax off. The power tools are for the big boys and girls. Social media is an added privilege, a dessert after the main course—the phone!

I can teach you everything you need to know about strategic sales, social selling, and how to close million-dollar deals. But first, you must address mindset and preparedness because these are the price of entry. Do you love people? Would you love to help a customer? Do you truly believe in your product or service? Do you respect yourself? It all starts with heart. Selling is a people business. You must go forth and wander out of the shadows of the shire. The most modern technology I can impart to you is the oldest of all: love of others and infinite curiosity!