Two Part Guest Contribution – Steve Kloyda, The Producer’s Toolbox

 When I first envisioned The Producer’s Toolbox and laid out the content for the site, call reluctance was a very small piece of the puzzle. Quite frankly my attitude at the time was simple and straightforward; ‘you’re afraid to talk to strangers, pick up the telephone and get over it’. I wasn’t minimizing call reluctance. It was just a normal part of our profession, something most of us face at one time or another when prospecting for new business. It just boiled down to gutting it out and making the calls.

In my many years of training and coaching producers in the financial services industry, it was rare to meet or train a sales person that felt comfortable with cold calling. But we are faced with quotas and making a living and we cannot satisfy the demands placed on us and succeed without prospecting. The accepted story says that a successful sales person is a product of the school of hard knocks and that call reluctance went with the territory. Two recent revelations helped me see how destructive call reluctance is to a promising career, to producers that are negatively impacted in their efforts to help people with their financial needs. This issue now takes on a much wider scope in The Producer’s Toolbox over all learning environment. It is crucial to expose and overcome the cold call and sales call demons if sales mastery is to be achieved.

Call Reluctance is Real

The second realization came as a result of my curiosity with the new industry growing out of the claim that cold calling no longer works. Companies offering email and direct mail campaigns base their existence off on this claim. I thought there might be possibilities for email as a prospecting tool but with millions of legitimate emails screaming through the Internet each day and millions of pieces of spam competing with my few prospecting emails, I saw trouble brewing. And then it hit me – how many sales people are rushing off to email campaign services, captivated by the ‘No More Cold Calling’ headlines that are driven by call reluctance? There is a new breed of entrepreneurs, perhaps sales people themselves suffering from fear and lack of confidence, that have recognized a niche for producers tormented by call reluctance. With that possibility, I realized how vital it is to tackle this beast. No legitimate success in our industry is possible if this issue continues to negatively impact our attempts to grow our business.

Cold Calling Success

I looked at several No More Cold Calling books on Amazon.com and read some reviews to see how sales people were responding. Many of the comments were favorable but I was struck most by what this gentleman said about one of the best selling books on the market:

The issue is not cold calling but “cold calling technique”. Remember that “skill = knowledge + practice”. Unfortunately most salespeople do not have the knowledge of how to effectively cold call, so naturally they fail and also have high fear and call reluctance. Ineffective cold calling is a sign of ineffective training. While you can win sales without cold calling, the author has eliminated a tool that works for those who have the knowledge of how to cold call correctly. Don’t fall for his trap”.