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

Continued from yesterday…

How many sales people begin their careers with reasonable product knowledge but little or no training in what this man calls “effective cold calling technique”? The answer to that question is obvious. Companies must assume that you learn this technique by default the more calls you make, by trial and error, in the school of hard and painful knocks. The ‘mentors’ we are assigned have prospecting experience but not what I would call effective skills and methods. Some will persevere through it all and become talented at art of cold calling. For most, something else very subtle and deadly happens. Call reluctance sets in. Unfortunately, instead of learning great techniques by making loads of calls, the reluctance condition grows with each call. As reluctance increases, the number of calls decreases.

For every producer there is a different version and variation of call reluctance. One may struggle with cold calling, another with facing objections, working with a gatekeeper, asking for referrals, closing a sale, or calling a customer with bad news. There are a lot of factors that bring on paralysis, either before or during a telephone sales call. The nature of this profession can and will aggravate and intensify the reasons behind call reluctance.

Call Reluctance Creeps In Slow

The deadly dynamics of call reluctance in all its forms is a slow and covert process. The difficulty you have picking up the phone is just the beginning. It is the slow and mostly unconscious avoidance behaviors that, to varying degrees, come to rule your day. Whether it is due to repeated failures, a lack of confidence in your sales ability, a traumatic event from your past, or fear of rejection, a ‘signature’ is created in your head. A pattern develops where that signature is triggered each time you face cold calling, asking for a referral, closing a sale, or delivering bad news. As the pattern becomes habit, your prospecting is replaced by shuffling papers, cleaning and organizing your desks, engaging in longer chats around the drinking fountain, more Internet surfing, emailing friends, telling yourselves a host of stories about why this isn’t a good time to prospect, that you’re not ready to start cold calling quite yet, this afternoon will be a better time to make your cold calls, that Wednesdays are good or bad days to prospect, and on and on. These thoughts and behaviors become so normal that the justification for cold calling avoidance becomes more creative and effortless.

Unfortunately we can’t always push this madness into our unconscious. From time to time a voice inside surfaces and wonders what am I doing?. We feel tension, frustration, guilt, and confusion because we really know what we’re doing. We know what game we’re playing. We also know that the quotas haven’t disappeared, that our success and livelihood still depend on prospecting, and that the further we push the inevitable away with our creative justification the closer it gets. That’s when we find the programs that claim cold calling is dead or no longer works and pour hard earned money into a tool that can never be as effective or personal as a telephone call. This is the final justification for ending telephone prospecting. It is our final attempt to blind us from the truth. From my point of view, call reluctance avoidance behavior is a form of insanity. It sure felt that way to me.

Now I don’t claim to be a psychologist nor do I want this to sound like a therapy session. However, through effective training, the bulk of these habitual patterns can be overcome. Given the number of sales people with great potential that either leave our profession or underachieve because of call reluctance, you can see how crucial it is to expose this condition and offer proven solutions. Being honest about your own call reluctance demons is the first step. Learning effective tools, skills, and techniques that prepare you for each and every call is the key second step to changing how you think and feel about prospecting and how proficient you are with prospects or gatekeepers.

Don’t allow an important and potentially successful career to suffer or end from call reluctance. Confidence is an illusive thing. Give yourself every chance to build and sustain the level of confidence necessary to push through issues like this on your road to sales mastery. Results are the measure of how well you have applied what you have learned.