Prospecting Behavior

1Session at a glance

2Open (0:00, 4 minutes)

• Draw two columns on the board headed We decide and They decide. Take four or five items from the room for each column before you fill any in yourself.
• Leave both columns up. Every time somebody later says a month was bad because prospects were slow, point at the right-hand column without saying anything.
• Say the split for the room: the two sales seats leave with a cookbook, everyone else leaves with a thirty-second introduction and three activity rows.

3Concept (0:04, 22 minutes)

The part you control (3 min)

• State the rule in plain terms and repeat it once: activity is what gets planned and managed, and the numbers that result are what gets watched. Nobody is managed on an outcome that somebody else decides.
• Give the principle underneath it in plain terms. An activity you control can be planned. An outcome somebody else decides cannot be planned, only watched. Same logic in any seat, different work.
• Answer the objection before it arrives, because somebody is thinking it. Watching the numbers still matters. If the activity was done in full and nothing came of it, the numbers are the only evidence that the ratios in the plan were wrong, and that is a plan problem rather than an effort problem.
• Name the failure mode of doing it the other way round. Manage a person on a closed number and the fastest way for them to improve it is to stop counting conversations honestly.

The cookbook, worked on the board (7 min)

• Define the three words before any figure goes up, because the chain is meaningless otherwise. A contact is a conversation with a person who could become a client or send us one, which means a voicemail is not a contact and an unanswered email is not a contact. An initial meeting is the first proper sit-down. A presentation is the meeting where what we propose goes in front of the people who decide.
• Say the warning label before the first figure and again after the last one: every number in this example was chosen to make the arithmetic visible. None of them is a Hermetic target and none of them came from our history.
• Fill line one and two. A goal of $4,000 of new monthly recurring revenue added each month, where monthly recurring revenue is the part of a client's fee that repeats every month rather than a one-time project. An average new agreement worth $2,000 a month.
• Do the first division out loud. $4,000 divided by $2,000 is 2 sales a month.
• Now go up the chain, one ratio at a time, writing each product on the board. 3 presentations to close one sale, so 2 multiplied by 3 is 6 presentations. 2 initial meetings to earn one presentation, so 6 multiplied by 2 is 12 initial meetings. 8 contacts to get one initial meeting, so 12 multiplied by 8 is 96 contacts a month.
• Do the last division. 20 working days in the month, so 96 divided by 20 is 4.8, which is 5 contacts every working day.
• Stop and ask the question the whole block exists for, and let it be answered honestly: is 5 real conversations a day, on top of everything else that person does, something they will actually do. If the answer is no, the plan is wrong now rather than in March.
• Name what can change, and be strict that effort is not one of them: the goal, the average size of an agreement, the ratios in the chain, or the time allowed to get there.
• Work one of them on the board so the room sees it move. If the average agreement were $4,000 a month instead of $2,000, then $4,000 divided by $4,000 is 1 sale, and 1 multiplied by 3 multiplied by 2 multiplied by 8 is 48 contacts a month, and 48 divided by 20 is 2.4 contacts a day. Same goal, different plan.

The activity plan (4 min)

• Make the point of the plan explicit: the cookbook says how many contacts. The plan says where they come from. A number with no source is a wish.
• Walk the five rows in section 4 of the Learner Guide. Referral conversations, existing-client conversations that surface new work, networking events, calls to businesses that fit our profile, and reviving old opportunities that went quiet.
• Insist on the third column every time. Frequency, a target count, and the preparation. The preparation column is the one that gets left blank and it is the one that decides whether the activity happens, because an hour blocked with no list in front of you turns into email.
• Add the column up in front of the room: 8 plus 12 plus 16 plus 48 plus 12 is 96, which is the number the cookbook asked for. If the column does not add up to the cookbook number, the plan is not finished yet.
• For the non-sales seats, point at rows two and five. A technician closing a ticket and asking what else is slow, and an intake seat noticing three tickets from the same department, both produce contacts nobody had to cold call for.

Competitive advantage and the problem statement (4 min)

• Put the three questions up and take answers from the room before showing the worked ones. Why do clients buy this kind of service at all, why do they buy it from us, and what would they lose by not buying it from us.
• Give the test that makes question two useful, because it is the one that fills up with soft answers: if a competitor could say the same sentence word for word, it is not an advantage. "Great service" fails. "Twenty-two years, locally owned, a team that is entirely local, and organizations of 10 to 200 people are the whole of what we do" survives, because it is checkable.
• Go through the worked answers in section 5 of the Learner Guide, staying inside what is true about us and nothing more.
• Read the draft problem statement out, then say plainly that it is a draft written to be argued with in this room and not approved marketing copy. Give the test: would a client we already have recognize themselves in it. If the room thinks not, that is the useful outcome of the block.

The introduction and the call (4 min)

• Three parts to the thirty-second introduction, and no more. Who you are and where you are calling from, a short version of the problem statement, and one question that invites a real answer. Sandler's name for it is the 30-second commercial.
• Be hard on the question, because this is where they go wrong. A question that can be answered with yes or no will be. A question that asks a stranger to agree they have a problem gets defended against. Ask instead how something works today: "How are you covering that at the moment?"
• Walk the five parts of the call from section 7 of the Learner Guide in order, saying what each part is for rather than reading the wording.
• Take the objection head on: giving somebody an easy way out in the first ten seconds sounds like giving the call away. What it buys is that the people who stay on are answering you rather than escaping you, and the people who leave give you a time to call back.

4Show (0:26, 10 minutes)

1. Build the revival list live in Nutshell. Filter to leads with no activity for ninety days or more. Read the count out loud whatever it turns out to be, and do not comment on it. That count is the fifth row of the activity plan and it already exists.
2. Pick one company off the list in front of the room. Not a chosen one. Say out loud which of the three competitive advantage questions you can answer for that company from the record and which you cannot.
3. Hand the volunteer the company. Tell the room the volunteer has been asked to brush you off at least once, so nobody thinks the demonstration is rigged the easy way.
4. Run the whole call standing up, in order, without notes. Name and company and the way out, the agreement about what the call is for and how long it runs, the thirty-second introduction, the close that asks them to suggest the next step, and the question about anything that might cause them to cancel.
5. Debrief against the five parts on the board. Ask the room which part was weakest, take the answer, and agree with it if it is right. Then run that one part again properly.
6. Log the outcome in Nutshell while the room watches. Either a next step with a date on it, or the lead closed with a reason. Silence is not an outcome.

5Do (0:36, 13 minutes)

1. Everyone answers the three competitive advantage questions from their own seat. Three short answers, written. A technician answers question two from what clients say to them on site, which is often better material than what the sales seats have.
2. Everyone drafts a thirty-second introduction. One line of who you are and where you are from, two or three sentences of the problem, and one question that cannot be answered with yes or no. Written out in full, on paper they keep.
3. Pair off and deliver it standing. The partner answers the hook question as a real person would. Swap. Two minutes each way.
4. Split the last part by seat. The two sales seats fill the blank cookbook in section 3 of the Learner Guide with their own figures and show every multiplication and division. Everybody else fills three rows of the activity plan with activities they can genuinely do, each with a frequency, a count and the preparation.
5. Two people read their introduction out. The presenter picks one sales seat and one seat that does not sell, and debriefs the hook question in both.

6Check (0:49, 7 minutes)

1. Two people have the same monthly target. One made 96 contacts last month and closed nothing. The other made 30 contacts and closed two. Whose activity do you manage, and what do you change?

   Answer

   Both, because activity is the only part either of them controls, and neither number tells you anything on its own yet. The person with 96 did the behavior that was agreed, so what gets examined is the inputs and the ratios: who was on the list, whether those contacts were conversations or voicemails, and what happened inside the meetings that came out of them. The person with 30 gets the same conversation in reverse, since two sales from 30 contacts is a far better ratio than the plan assumed, and the question is whether the list or the approach that produced it can be repeated.

   The obvious answer is that the first person is failing and the second is fine, and it is wrong on both halves. One month of one person's results is far too small a sample to say anything about a ratio. Treating it as a verdict punishes the one person who did the part that was actually within their control, and it teaches everybody that the safe move is to report fewer contacts.

2. Someone works their cookbook and lands on 20 contacts a day, which they will not do. Name the four things that can change, and explain why working harder is not one of them.

   Answer

   The goal, the average size of a sale, the ratios in the chain, or the time allowed to reach the goal. Working harder is not on the list because the 20 came out of arithmetic rather than out of effort. The chain already assumes the person does every contact in it, so there is no unused effort left to find. One of the four inputs was wrong, and the honest move is to say which one and change it now.

   Worked, using the model figures from this session: at an average agreement of $2,000 a month a $4,000 goal needs $4,000 divided by $2,000, which is 2 sales. Double the average agreement to $4,000 and it needs $4,000 divided by $4,000, which is 1 sale, and every number downstream halves with it.

3. An activity plan row says "more calls to local businesses". Name the three things the row is missing and say what each one prevents.

   Answer

   A frequency, a target count and the preparation. Without a frequency it is never on a calendar and it loses every week to whatever is urgent. Without a count it cannot be added into the monthly total, so nobody can tell whether the plan reaches the number the cookbook asked for. Without the preparation named, the blocked hour arrives with no list built and turns into email, which is the single most common way a plan fails while everyone is still willing.

4. A hook question gets "no, we're fine, thanks" every time. What is wrong with the question, and what would you replace it with?

   Answer

   Two things. It can be answered with one word, so it will be. And it asks a stranger to admit in the first thirty seconds that something is wrong with how they run their company, which is a thing almost nobody does on a cold call. Replace it with a question about how the work is covered today rather than whether it is broken. "How are you covering that at the moment?" or "Who picks it up when that happens on a Friday night?" Both need a sentence to answer, and the sentence is the information.

5. The opening of the call hands the other person an easy way out in the first ten seconds. Why is that not giving the call away?

   Answer

   Because what is being protected is the conversation rather than the two minutes. Somebody who feels they cannot get off the call defends themselves by agreeing to whatever ends it and then never answering again, and that agreement was worth nothing. Offering the exit costs you the calls that were not going anywhere and buys a straight answer from the rest. It also produces something usable out of a no, which is a time to call back, and a call somebody escaped from produces nothing at all.

6. The last part of the call asks whether anything might come up that would cause them to cancel. Why ask a question that appears to invite the cancellation?

   Answer

   Because whatever would cancel the meeting exists whether it is asked about or not, and the phone call is the only moment when something can be done about it. The answers are usually ordinary and fixable on the spot: a quarter close that week, a planned absence, or a person who has to be in the room and has not been invited yet. Each of those has a solution while you are still on the phone and none of them has one at eight in the morning on the day.

   The obvious answer is that raising cancellation plants the idea. It does not. Somebody who intends to keep the meeting simply says so, and somebody who was never going to show was already not going to show. What the question actually protects is the half day spent driving to a meeting the other person had forgotten, which a ten-second question would have found.

7Close (0:56, 4 minutes)

Work after this session

• The practice steps in section 8 of the Learner Guide: a thirty-second introduction written out in full, and either a completed cookbook or three rows of an activity plan with frequency, count and preparation.
• The two sales seats bring a filled cookbook to their next one-to-one with every multiplication and division shown, and an honest yes or no on the daily number.
• Chapter 10 of the Sandler Foundations workbook, in the reference folder, for anyone who wants the source.

What happens next

Say this plainly rather than reading it. There is no session 11. This was the last of the ten, and what the room has now is the whole system in one piece: bonding and rapport, the up-front contract, pain, budget, decision, fulfillment, and post-sell. Steps three, four and five are the qualification steps, and steps six and seven only happen once those three are answered. The arc covered why a system exists at all and the four outcomes that count as a result, meaning a yes, a no, a referral, or a clear and well understood future, how people decide whether to trust you, the agreement made at the start of a conversation about what it is for and what happens at the end, how to find what a problem is actually costing a client and how to ask about it, how to find out whether they are willing and able to invest, how to find out who decides and how, how to present and then keep a decision from coming apart, the three parts of performance that can be worked on, and now the activity that fills the top of the pipeline.

What changes from Monday is that this gets run against real opportunities instead of examples. Every live opportunity in Nutshell gets placed on a step. Every first meeting opens with an agreement about what the meeting is for, how long it runs and what happens at the end. No proposal gets written before pain, budget and decision have real answers. Every meeting booked on a phone call ends with the question about what might cause a cancellation. And the activity that produces the next opportunity gets planned in advance with a count against it, rather than being what is left over after the week.

Open items to settle

• Whether the activity plan rows get somewhere to live in Nutshell, so contacts can be counted without anybody reporting them by hand.
• Whether contacts per week belongs on the Scorecard in Strety, and which seat owns the number.
• Which of the three competitive advantage answers the room actually agrees on, and who owns turning the draft problem statement into the version we all use.
• Whether the ratios in the cookbook can be worked out from our own Nutshell history rather than assumed, and who checks them after a quarter.

8Sources

• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations, chapter 10, Prospecting Behavior: chapter PDF.
• Sandler Systems, Sandler Foundations: full workbook PDF.

The cookbook, the 30-second commercial and the no-pressure prospecting call are Sandler's terms. Every figure in the worked cookbook is a model example chosen to make the arithmetic visible, the five prospecting activities are ours, and the competitive advantage answers and the draft problem statement are ours and are written to be argued with.

9After the session