Jeb Blount’s Prospecting System: Why You Call Your A List First (Ask Jeb)

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0:30This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi, I'm Jeb Blunt, bestselling author, fanatical prospecting, objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. All right, everybody. Next up on the show is David Jacobs from New Castle, Pennsylvania. David, what's going on in your world? So on my end, I'm a business development guy at A Plus Keystone. I've recently fully bought into fanatical prospecting, and it's given me a real leg up in my role in business development. So I just had a question that came up for me while I've been starting these campaigns the last two months that I wanted to run by you.

1:05Tell me what you sell. A Plus Keystone is an ISO 17025 accredited compliance laboratory in Newcastle, PA. So we do accredited third-party testing for different categories like electromagnetic compatibility, environmental testing, and packaging. So think company standards like military and defense space or like FDA standards. That's kind of where we fit. Companies would basically come to us to validate their engineering products so that they can launch it to their target market. That sounds like a real technical sell. It is. So you're speaking with technical people. And that's why, Jeb, it's more of a business development role, right?

1:37Where I go and I find these folks, I see what type of testing they need, and then I'm looping in somebody else as soon as possible. I can speak a little bit to it, but there's a limit to my knowledge when it comes to these things. You've adopted a fanatical prospecting, got it all together with this product that you're selling, which is complicated, I can tell, and complex. So what's the problem? For me, I'm trying to figure out how to best balance pulling lead lists while doing just the right amount of research, right? It's a technical field. And I'm trying to find the specific person inside of each company that requires what we're doing.

2:08And sometimes that's going to be the engineer, sometimes the program manager, project manager, quality control guy, or the CEO themselves. I'm basically chewing through my quality trade show leads pretty quickly. And I know that there's a bottom to that well eventually. At the rate you've got me going with fanatical prospecting, I'm making 40, 50, 60 calls a day to these folks just trying to book meetings to see how we could help them out. Way better than what I was doing before. So thank you again for that. My initial attempts to scrape a lead list off of a database produced significantly worse results compared to these trade show leads.

2:41So I'm trying to rethink the best way to scrape, segment, and batch these new lists for outreach. I just want to see if you have any methodologies for me on how I can efficiently research, script, and prospect a cold lead like this without running into constant pushback from gatekeepers. Well, you're going to run into gatekeepers. There's nothing you can do about that. Let's take the trade show leads. So you said something, you're hitting the bottom of the well on the trade show leads. When you say that, tell me what that means. If I had to pull all of our trade show leads from the past five years in our CRM, I've got probably about a thousand names in there.

3:10It's wonderful, and that's what I'm working out of. I'm not going to just call them once and leave them either. So I'll keep calling back a couple times to those folks. It takes time to create those lists. And I just want to have a source that isn't just our trade show leads, right? I want to be able to go and find new companies local to my area, right? That might not be going through a trade show and try to figure out, okay, I've got this company name, this NYX code, whatever I'm looking for. How do I find that right person within that company? Finding the right person is going to be a problem for you.

3:37And I don't want to sugarcoat this because as you said, it could be any of these different people that make the decision. So what you want to basically think about inside these organizations is the only way you're going to find out who the actual person is that's going to make the call on whether to do business with you or set an appointment with you is you're just going to have to talk to all those people and have each one of them tell you who's the person you should be talking with. Because if it was like clear cut, you know, this is the person who does it on every call, then you would know I got to go find this particular title.

4:08The CEOs in a lot of these companies have a lot of juice, then I say, well, start at the top. Call the CEO and then have the CEO push you down. But CEOs are also really hard to get in touch with. Like if you tried prospecting me, unless you've got my cell phone number and you call me in between doing stuff like this, you're probably not going to get through. And if you call my office, you're never going to get through. Now, that doesn't mean you can't get through. It just means that it's going to be very, very difficult. Calling a mid-level leader or manager at an organization will be infinitely easier, although that person may not be the decision maker.

4:39So you've got to think about what question am I asking when I call in that would help that person identify who I should be having a conversation with. That essentially is when you're calling in, you're not thinking, I'm calling in to set the appointment. I'm calling in to qualify. And if you shift that mindset just a little bit, you just got to think, what's the question that I'm going to ask in this particular situation? So for example, in a former life, the question that I would ask is, who's the person who signs the invoice for, right? So I would just say, who's the person who signs the invoice for these things?

5:09And usually the gatekeeper would give me that person because if I'm asking about who signs the invoice for, it sounds official and I would typically get through, or at least I would get a name. You got to start thinking like, what question would you ask that would call someone to want to send you that person? Like you might say, who's the person who keeps the records on compliance in this particular area? The records part is key. Yeah. Cause if I call in and ask, Hey, who does your compliance testing or who's responsible for that? They're like, oh, that might be this person, but you don't need to talk to them, right?

5:38And then you sound like a salesperson, but you know, like who's the person responsible for the records on this? And you sound like super official. You've got a thousand leads from your trade shows, okay? Some of those, you'll have multiple names, but like how many of those would be individual companies? So start with the company, boom, and then think company, how do I multi-thread where I came from? We called it getting high, wide and deep. Finding the names of those people is going to be some research. Like you can go to LinkedIn. And I don't know if you've read the LinkedIn edge. It's a great pairing with financial prospecting.

6:07It'll show you some ways that you can use LinkedIn to identify some of those people. Now, all those people won't be on LinkedIn, but with, I don't know, upwards to 4 billion people in business on LinkedIn now, there's a pretty good chance that you might be able to identify some of those folks. If your company provides you with any type of tool, The one tool that I would highly recommend is a tool called ZoomInfo. It's expensive. I use it. I love it. It's great. My whole team uses it. I would say, you know, take a look at ZoomInfo because you can actually go into a company and it'll give you a org chart inside that company of all the people that are there.

6:40Then at least you have a person that you can call into. The other thing, I know you know this, like you look at Chamber of Commerce records. You can look at different places on the internet. You can look at a company's on website. Sometimes you can find names of people. You'll certainly be able to find the names of the top officers. But the key thing is just getting in and then asking the right question. A company that I work with, one of their salespeople in one of our trainings was telling a story about they were trying to find the person who handled a particular type of service. And it was the same issue.

7:07In some companies, it's this person. In some companies, it's this person. And they can never figure out who it is. And it was a rather large company. So they just called in and got the phone tree. You know, you call into a company and you get an automated operator and just started pushing buttons. and would get anybody on the phone and would just start asking for people or asking for a department. And he said, it took me three, four weeks, but I kept doing this, kept doing it. And finally, I got hooked up with this guy named Mark inside the organization who was the right person, but it just took a lot of bouncing off of people and asking the right questions to get there.

7:40The other thing that you can do is call their sales department and ask the salespeople. That's the easiest thing you can do. I think we talk about that in Fanatical Prospecting. You call up and say, I'm in sales. Who do I talk to around your compliance? What I want you to get used to is you're on a treasure hunt. You've got a big jigsaw puzzle and you've got to put it together. Rather than thinking I'm burning through leads, you think I've got all of these company names. I've got some individuals who we've collected at trade shows who we've talked to. And then I've got to go be a detective and talk to those people, ask them the right questions to get connected with the person in the organization that ultimately is going to make the decision.

8:19At the same time, think sometimes those decisions, especially when they're really important decisions that could impact, for example, a company who is selling to the military and there are severe compliance issues for making sure that what they're selling to the military passes these particular inspections. If they're doing that, it's likely that you may have multiple people who have influence on the deal. And being able to know who those people are as you bring in your subject matter expert and your account executives who can sell that, being able to provide them with that information makes their life a lot easier for bringing a coalition of people in who can sell.

8:53I know you're looking for the easy button because everybody is, and there just isn't one. Like, this is the beautiful thing about selling. It's one of the things I love the most about prospecting. As weird as this sounds, like it makes me so happy. Like I get warm and fuzzy inside thinking I got a prospect list and I got to figure out who's who and I got to track them down and I got to get them because the victory in doing that is just so powerful. And that's the one thing that I would say to you as an SDR, BDR. It's sometimes hard, especially you're young, accepting that, hey, I got one more name or I got one more piece of information or I got something I didn't have before as a victory.

9:26when it feels like the only victory is setting the appointment or getting a fully qualified prospect over to your sales team, take the W. If you get like one kernel of information that gets you closer to the person who makes the decision, give yourself a high five, take it home because that's exactly what the job is. One other thing you might want to think about in terms of building lists, I would go read the LinkedIn Edge. Products like Zoom Info are just amazing. They're powerful, but also look at AI. For example, finding companies in your area. One thing you can do, I would start on Gemini.

9:58And what you might say is take a company that's in your local area that you currently do business with and say, give me other companies that are like this company or give me other companies that are competitors of this company. Best to do it in a geographical area in this city and give it to me in a table format with the name of the company, a phone number, the name of their CEO, an email address for the CEO if you can find it, and a mailing address. It'll very quickly spit out a table for you. You can run it through a couple of times just to make sure because usually on the first pass, it won't give you everything.

10:31But it's a really efficient way, especially like if you get a trade show list or you get a chamber of commerce list and you wanna see, can I find other companies like this? It works out really, really well as long as you keep it in a nice geographic space. I did this recently in Lubbock, Texas and got 20 prospects in about five seconds. Then we went out and knocked doors. It's an effective way. It's not as good as what you'll get on Zoom Info where you can get cell phone numbers and personal emails, all those things. But for an intrepid BDR like you, who is sleuthing and trying to find all the right people, it's at least another tool that you can put in your toolbox that will help you find those folks.

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11:39Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash Jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. We used ZoomInfo previously and switched to lead four-on-one. And then the AI lists, we have those as well. I think where I was getting tripped up, Jim, is you handed to me a process that was very, very efficient. Schedule your call blocks, find your golden hours, do nothing but call folks during this period of time. Right. And that skyrocketed my productivity. So I got a taste of what it's like to go through and just find a bunch of folks very quickly. And I became concerned that I was spending too long with the research portions, right?

12:16Outside of those blocks, going in and saying, hey, this is who I got a hold of. This is who I need to get a hold of next. But it sounds like to me, that is the chewing glass part of the job. That's where I have to just sit down and just do it, make the plan, and then get them ready for that calling block. But recognize that your call block is also research, right? Because you're going to call in and as you're calling, you're asking questions and you're gathering information and that information makes your list better for the next day. So you say next day. So when I'm assembling this puzzle, as you say, I'm calling the same company within the same week.

12:46Yeah. Effectively. If I call this morning and I talk to Steve at a company, right? And Steve says, no, I don't really handle that. Judy over in blah, blah, blah is responsible for that. Well, I could bounce off Steve and call Judy in the next moment. I mean, once I talk to Steve and I get the information and Steve's not the right person, I'm going to log that into the CRM. But that doesn't mean that Steve doesn't have an influence on that. I just go, Steve knows who handles this. So that's important. Judy's the next person. And then I load that up. So you think about your list, like let's just go CBA, right?

13:13A C list is they hand you a list of a thousand leads from a trade show. You don't know unless they tell you the lead is fully qualified. It's fully qualified. You call and you find out a name of somebody or you find out some information. You move them to your B list. And I'm sure that your company has given you a list of here are our core qualifiers, right? And then you talk to them again and you get fully qualified. You know what they're doing, you know who they're buying from, you know who the person is you need to talk to, you know how much of what you sell they're using. You get everything lined up.

13:42Now that's a fully qualified A. So as you start a call block, if you were called like the prospecting pyramid inside of Fanatical Prospecting, when you start your call block in the morning, you should be calling your A's because your A's are the ones where you know exactly who it is that you need to talk to and your focus is on setting appointments. Then once you set those appointments, let's just say that you need to set three appointments a day. Let's say you set 100 appointments a day, your sales team can't handle it. They can only handle so much. The next thing you go is you move to your Cs and you go, okay, I'm missing these two pieces of information.

14:12How do I get to this information? Now that could be a pre-call block research. It could be something, I'm gonna try to find this on the internet or it could be I need a call or send them an email. And then you go to your C list where you don't have a whole lot of anything. You can even go to Ds. Like if you go to that lead program that you've got, you just pull a list of companies off of there, or you get Jim and I to give you a list of companies in a local area, that's D. All I got is a name of a company and a phone number. I've got to call in, get a little information. Once I get the information, I move them to the next list, move to the next list, move to the next list.

14:43So your A list is going to be relatively small, right? Your B list will be bigger. Your C list will be bigger. Your D list, which is all of your like pure leads, is going to be massive. Then from a research standpoint, all you've got to recognize is that prospecting isn't research and research isn't prospecting. So block the time for research and just do research and then block the time for prospecting and just do prospecting. And don't try to do the same thing at the same time. If you're looking up information on a lead before you call it, that's wrong. If you've looked all that information up and you built your list and you're dialing, that's right.

15:15One thing at a time, not both at the same time. And maybe I got this wrong, but the thing I think is super important for you is recognize that most of what you're doing is research. Like most of what you're doing is tracking down information. It's putting this big jigsaw puzzle together until you get to a point where I have a lead fully qualified. I know exactly who the person is that makes the decision. And now I've got to get to that person and convince them to meet with me. That's the pinnacle. That's what we're all doing. Do that first thing in the morning. And then the rest of your day is going to be building that list for the next morning.

15:46So you come in every day, knock off two, three appointments that you can set with highly qualified prospects. And then the rest of the day is getting to the point where you can do it again the next morning. Does that connect? Yeah, absolutely. This is fantastic. I didn't really connect in the book what you meant by ABC list in this manner. I think I just treat it as, hey, they're either on or they're off. I'm trying to find when they're on, right? And I'm just going to keep calling until I find when they're on. But this ABC account list is a paradigm shift for me. And I'm very excited to get started on this.

16:16We've been having this conversation a lot in our own company about, I mean, we've got a million prospects in our database, right? But they're just information. If you look at our CRM, on the right side of every company, there's a list of qualifiers. And the goal is to fill all those qualifiers in. And once we have all those qualifiers, then depending on what we're selling in the moment, right, we can call them. So for example, right now, I've got my team calling for outbound. So the outbound conference this year in Las Vegas. And the outbound conference, by the way, this is a gratuitous sales pitch, right?

16:44But the Outbound Conference is the biggest, baddest sales training and leadership conference in the world. And you and your entire team should show up there. And it's at this amazing resort. So we've got our A-list of Outbound Conference companies who we call small companies. They've got three, four people that might want to attend. So I've got a team doing that. They are fully qualified. And we know exactly who we're calling. And we're calling in with a direct pitch to buy tickets. But we've got others that we're trying to figure out. We're not calling those with a direct pitch. We're calling those to ask questions about how many sales people they have and what their sales team looks like and, you know, who makes decisions on training.

17:18All of that information over here, completely different calls. Then we're calling in and going for the jugular on the A-list. No, that's really solid. So here's my question for you then when constructing these ABC lists. Do you have any pointers on how to build that structure from the ground up? Because, Jeb, I'd be lying to you if I told you that I had a list of qualifiers. I know what I need to get an RFQ going, request for quote. I know what those questions are. Again, that's very much they're either on or they're off type of thing. And I'll figure it out with AI if you can't point me in the right direction.

17:46But any ideas of where I could go resource wise, videos, books, anything like that, just to see what that structure should look like? The answer is inside your organization. There's no book or AI that's going to do this for you. So I'll give you the easy one. Do I know the name of the decision maker? Do I know the names of the influencers? And by the way, do I have the contact information? Do I have a name of my competitor? If you go into the LinkedIn edge book, you'll find an ICP blueprint, which is really helpful. So you would say, these are the characteristics of our best opportunities. Ask the leaders in your company.

18:16We only want to do business with companies that are doing this much volume of testing, right? If they're only doing this much volume of tests, we don't want them. How many tests do they run a year? So if you could call someone up and say, how many compliance tests do you run a year? And they say a hundred and you go, okay, boom, you're qualified. If they go three or four, you go off my list. You're not qualified. There's five ISO tests you all run. If they do test outside of that, they're not qualified. If they do test inside, they're qualified. If they do business with the military, that would be your top level prospect.

18:44All of the answers you're looking for are inside your company. I would try to get it to five. Like there's five qualifiers that say, if I have all of these answers, I want to set an appointment with them. Obviously the easy one is that they're going to be putting out an RFQ or an RFP. There's a budgetary period happening or they have a contract with a business that they're going to be moving off of. So I worked in a business for a long time that had contracts. And so my number one qualifier is when is your contract expiration date? If I knew that, then everything else was easy. If I didn't know that, it was really, really hard.

19:15That was like my money ball metric. In your case, if you don't have contracts, it doesn't matter. If one of the qualifiers is when is their contract with their current provider up, then that's the first question you're asking. When is your contract? Who are you with? So I would sit down with your team and say, what are the five things that if I knew these things, you would be salivating to get into this account? And so then now you know, like I've got to build that information until I have that information. I don't want to set an appointment with them. I have no doubt because I've been in sales as long as I have that you've set appointments with people that your sales team has pushed back on you and said, this wasn't a good lead.

19:48This wasn't qualified. We shouldn't have been here. Why did you set this appointment? You know that I know that that happens right now. You're really thinking I'm not just going for volume. volume, I'm going for the highest quality prospect in the pipeline that gives us the highest probability of closing the deal. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Everything you said is true. I'm eager, Jeb, and also I'm an optimist like most salespeople should be, right? Where I'm sitting over everything. Hey, we could help this guy. He's testing one thing at 150 bucks every five years, but we can help him, right? My homework for you.

20:18Go sit down with your team. Go get the LinkedIn edge. There's an ICP framework in the very beginning of that book. It's a Fanatical Prospecting plugin, build that blueprint out with your team. Just sit down and do that. I promise you it'll change your life. No, that's good, Jeb. I'll go pick up LinkedIn Edge first thing here and I'll start working on my homework here. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Have a good one. Thanks for being a Fanatical Prospector. Talk to you later.

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