Customer Reviews

Hot Prospects: The Proven Prospecting System to Ramp Up Your Sales Career

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The concepts in this book have changed the way I think about prospecting and have helped me dramatically improve the results from my prospecting calls every day. I have used Bill Good's concepts to build a niche business (retirement plan advice) from the ground up. I have used the Internet resources in this book to find the names of retirement plan participants to call at work, during the day. I then present and briefly qualify those who are interested. I routinely open 10-12 new client relationships each month.

If you have read Bill's earlier book, Prospecting Your Way to Sales Success , save your money! His new book is nothing but a tired rehash of his older book, tidied up to comply with the Do Not Call laws.

However, I'll give Bill credit for one great idea. If a prospect says they're not interested - believe them. Our profession has such a bed reputation due to the old-style training that you shouldn't give up until you hear "no" five times.

If you want to learn how to cook, watch old reruns of Julia Child on TV. If you want to learn how to handle a racecar, enroll in NASCAR champion Dale Jarrett's driving school. And if you want to learn almost everything about sales prospecting, read Bill Good's durable book on the topic. It's a classic. Good is a noted authority on selling - on sales prospecting, in particular - and colleges, trade schools and sales seminars teach his techniques. If you search for his name and the word "sales" on the Internet, you will get more than 40,000 hits. A master sales trainer, Good fully details his sales lead and prospecting program in this popular book, now updated with information on how to use e-mail, the Internet and other technology to enhance your prospecting efforts. If you sell or manage salespeople, getAbstract recommends reading this book - it's a Good thing.

I started as a financial advisor with a major full service investment firm in May of 1983 and "grew up" with Bill Good's cherries and pits training and tapes (before "downloads!"). I began his Gorilla Marketing system in September 1987 (a few weeks before the crash) I guess I was doing around $250,000 gross at the time. He said I could double my production or work half as much. Well.... I'm glad to report that he helped me do more than both :) I've been doing over a Million for the last 10 years, averaging around 1.5 million a year. AND never working on Thursday or Friday afternoons or nights or weekends. And I guess barely during the day!

As good as all that looks on paper, the reality is my clients have gotten older. For the last 10 years I've been at a bit of a plateau at this 1.5 level. I was feeling like I've been going in circles without a compass lately and then I saw his new book. I figured it's basically the same book that he wrote 20 years ago. And in a way it is I guess, but he has TOTALLY inspired me with this new book! It's all been completely rewritten reflecting our world in 2008.
The number one reason his training helped me in the 80's and is helping again now is his way to take the emotion out of our prospecting and therefore make it possible to do the activities that are necessary to "happen upon" interested people. For me, it really makes the process almost fun (!) ... (have I lost my mind?)

I purchased this book because Bill Good claimed this was a "working book" and that we would be provided with

"31 Letters
24 Scripts
6 Checklists
1 White Paper Template
3 Letter Templates
4 Sample Direct Mail Letters
1 Proposal Guide
1 Sales Profile
2 Bonus Chapters
1 Web Resources Page
1 List Resources Page"

When I opened the book I found none of those resources readily available. Instead I realized that I had to dig through acres of stories about the most basic of sales principals and Bill Good's in depth and personally concocted analogies (something about cherries) to find the clue for the password to the website for each section to get the materials!!! What a pain! Maybe if this was a children's book a treasure hunt would have been appropriate, however, most working professionals just prefer to have easy access to what they have purchased.

There was no reason for him to do this like this. We already paid for the book, the information should have been within its pages.

Not pleased at all... If you want a third grade style lesson on sales and prospecting, buy this book. If you want what Bill Good advertises on his website, you won't find it here.

Great, couple of things I learned from this book that are worth mentioning:
1. During a cold call, if someone is being mean or otherwise doesn't want to talk to you, say "Thankyouverymuch" and hangup.
2. If you are good at closing sales you shouldn't be qualifying prospects because you are not maximizing your ROI
3. Having to link to worksheets on the internet by finding the codeword in a chapter is cute but not fun. Just give me the content I paid for.

If it wasn't for #3 this book would get 5 stars.

Bill's book has helped me realize a few things that I had forgotten when you are cold calling prospects. One of these is that when someone says they aren't intertested, don't push them too hard, otherwise you ruin your chances to "hunt" them another day. Also, don't try to call prospects and be the salesperson too. This IS a waste of your valuable time because you cannot gain any momentum. Bill uses real world examples of what doesn't work any why AND the correct approach to gain more sales.

I have been working with Bill Good Marketing for the last 18 years and he and his system have built my practice. Reading his latest book is like getting a large boast of energy to build some more. This book is laid out in such a way that no one following the instructions should ever not succeed. The book along with the awesome amount of free information from the book's website make the price of the package way to cheap. Once again the master of the prospecting systems has done it so well, he has no competition. If you have a business of any kind, you owe it to yourself to get this book.

Like almost all financial advisors, I've followed Bill Good's writing and training for years and had the pleasure to learn from him. Bill is highly ethical and has great quality control.
I was at a conference once and another attendee casually said to me "When it comes to our industry, Bill Good is the smartest man in the world." I sort of thought about that for a while and realized that he is probably right- there isn't really anyone who does what Bill does who knows the business as well as he does.
Bill has trained, taught and in turn, learned from, the who's who of the financial world for a few decades now including in depth observation of some leading financial pros for months at a time --- not to mention meeting thousands of them at his training etc.
Knowing the impact his work has and the sheer number of fans of his work, there will be a lot of reviews like this - I highly recommend his book.

I was pleased to have played a part in Bill's new book.

Bill and I first met in 1973. At that time he was just a budding writer who also worked in the trenches, running a telemarketing room for an office supply company. It was during those early years that he began to formulate and test the successful systems that he wrote about in his books on prospecting and lead development. Fast forward to several months ago when I found myself sitting in my son's family room with Bill Good while he was putting the finishing touches on some of the meatier chapters of his new book. (Did I mention did I mention that my son married Bill's daughter?) We began discussing some of this material in depth. I suddenly realized that not only could I apply some of Bill's brilliant insights to my own business, my clients could use this to double or triple their results from their RSVP advertising. Now let me tell you, Bill is not an ivory tower writer. He doesn't just talk the talk, he walks the walk. The examples he gives in his book are not very, they come from real life. Lo and behold within the pages of Hot Prospects: Proven Strategies to Ramp up Your Sales Career you will find some references to RSVP Marketing, which emerged from my conversations with Bill that very weekend. I am honored to have had an opportunity to make even a tiny contribution to such a fabulous book.

Of course the reason I'm so excited is that what Bill has written will help our clients turn more of their RSVP leads into sales. Anyone in the advertising or lead generation business should buy this book and get it to their clients. The better job people do converting your leads to sales, the more advertising they will buy. By adding some of the structure from Hot Prospects, more of them will set appointments which, according to Bill, is the test of whether they are hot or not.