Cold Call Reluctance
How to overcome your fear of cold calling and build your sales pipeline.
For thousands of salespeople picking up the phone and cold calling a prospect is the most stressful part of their day. Many of these reluctant salespeople stifle their earning potential or worse get fired.
We received this question from Dave, a sales rep from North Carolina, Dave writes:
Jeb I need your advice. The first call to a prospect proves very difficult for me and I know it’s all in my head. I’m like that kid in 7th grade who is calling a girl to go to a school dance and then gets scared when her dad answers the phone. I’m normally very confident, comfortable with product knowledge, and I can close business. But, when I’m on the phone with a new prospect, it’s a different story. I know that if I can overcome this my monthly goals will get knocked out quicker than a fixed prizefight. Please help.
Dave, you have an excellent question and one that is very common. What I am impressed with is instead of giving me a line of BS about “how much better you are in person,” you are acknowledging that using the phone is critical to your success and that you need to deal with your call reluctance problem.
You’ve obviously got a lot of talent for sales. You are well educated, articulate, and you can close deals. Your problem is you need to get more prospects in your pipeline and to do that you need to make more calls.
So you get up every day and head into the office with every intention of getting on the phone and finding new prospects. And everything is ok until you start dialing that first number. As you listen to the dial tone your palms sweat, your heart pounds, and you secretly pray that no one will answer. Then, your prospect or a gatekeeper answers and you forget what to say. You stumble over your words. They reject you. You feel embarrassed and little. And you look around hoping that no one over heard your disaster of a call. Your motivation for calling evaporates and you shuffle papers, waste time and do anything but dial again.
Every sales person wants the glory and the big pay check that results from closing big deals. However, before the glory comes the hard work. In other words sales success is paid for in advance with prospecting for new customers.
Unfortunately prospecting is the most despised activity in sales. Calling people you don’t know is uncomfortable. You get a tremendous amount of rejection. And frankly, it’s not very much fun. This is why prospecting and cold calling are put off by many Sales Professionals day after day until soon, it is too late.
Far too many Sales Professionals lose their jobs or fail to achieve their true potential because prospecting was not a priority. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can manage your fear and reluctance to prospect with a few simple tactics.
There is good news and bad news. The bad news is this fear of cold calling will never really go away. It will always be uncomfortable picking up the phone and calling people you don’t know. It is just not a natural thing to do. There will always be calls and even days when you fumble your words and become embarrassed. And you will always hear more nos and rejection that yeses and acceptance. I’ve been selling for 20 years and I still get nervous and reluctant to call from time to time – and I actually like cold calling. But look, if cold calling was easy everyone would be in sales.
The good news is you can gain enough control over your call reluctance and fear to keep your pipeline full. Now let me preface this with telling you that these techniques are designed primarily to get you on the phone. Once you get over your initial fear of making calls you can then incorporate techniques for making those call more successful. But, first things first.
One of the key reasons that we fear cold calling is we project our own feelings on the people we are calling. We imagine that they will judge us. We think they will be angry because we’ve interrupted their day. We believe they will dislike us because we are trying to sell them something. And we rationalize that they don’t want what we are selling anyway, to sooth our anticipated rejection. In other words we make decisions for our prospects before we’ve even had a chance to speak with them. All of this tends to come to the surface right as we pick up the phone. It’s a horrible feeling. And the key to success is turning it off. To do that you have to acknowledge this feeling for what it is – fear. You will be amazed at how easy it is to get past this initial fear once you acknowledge that it is there. It doesn’t mean that you won’t still feel it – just that you accept it for what it is.
The next thing is to break your call blocks into small chunks and set goals for those chunks. It is much easier to set a goal to make ten calls than 100 or to dial for 15 minutes rather than an hour. It is much easier overcome your initial fears and trepidations a few calls at time. You can get your mind around these small chunks. This is how I overcame my fear of cold calling early in my sales career.
What I did was set an overall goal for each daily phone block. For example, I would decide in advance to make 25 dials. Next I would set smaller 5 call blocks. Then I would pump myself up for these calls; make the calls, and when they were complete reward myself. The way I rewarded myself was with 10 minutes of reading a motivating sales book for every 5 dials. Then I’d do it over again.
The reason a chose to read a sales book is that it was both an investment in developing my overall sales skills and it served the purpose of pumping me up for my next 5 calls. It helped me remain mentally focused and it worked. Over time I actually learned to like cold calling and overcame my call reluctance. And along the way I read a bunch of great books. These days with podcasts and audio programs you can mix it up a bit.
My final tip for you Dave is to make sure you know what you want. When you know what you want you can tap your desire to overcome fear. I discuss this in detail in my book Power Principles. (To sure you have a clear set of goals – you can pick up a free 2009 Goals and Planning guide. When you harness your desire you focus on what you want to achieve, instead of what you don’t want to do. Suddenly prospecting becomes easy because the result of prospecting, more sales, is tied to something you want – your dreams and goals. in the Sales Store at SalesGravy.com.) Then each day before you start your sales day review those goals and visualize how much you want to achieve them.
This is Jeb Blount, the Sales Guy. If you have a sales question please send it to salesguy@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock