Prospecting is one of a salespersons most important activities, and one of the most challenging. There are so many marketing messages competing for attention in the marketplace, it is hard to get heard. It can be even harder when you are first trying to start the relationship. Cold calling, one of the basic ways to start a new business relationship, is also one of the toughest. I once worked with someone who would stare at the phone for 30 minutes before he had talked himself into picking it up and making a call. Understanding why cold calling is so tough, though, can help you make it more effective.
Cold calling is not a "natural" activity. We aren't wired to enjoy rejection, in fact, we are wired to avoid it. In fact, it's only in the last 100 years, with the advent of door to door and phone soliciting, that selling has required salespeople to encounter large amounts of rejection - with all of its negative emotional consequences. The dreaded cold call, then, is a relatively new challenge, and our underlying psychological framework is ill-equipped to handle it.
There is an asymmetry of the psychology of phone prospecting. I was inspired by a reading of Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness. While discussing the psychology of the stock market (page 97), he points out that many people make poor choices because they respond to the frequency of events differently than the magnitude of events. For example, the number of losses is much more important than the magnitude of losses - we don't like frequent disappointments, even if they aren't very big. This hurts investors because, emotionally, it feels better to have lots of small gains and infrequent, but massive, losses. It feels better - but it affects the bottom line negatively.
This also explains why most people have a genuine block to cold calling. It's an activity where even though the magnitude of the positive reward (a sale) is high, there are frequent small, negative outcomes (someone saying no). What also compounds this effect is that as the magnitude of the positive reward increases, the number of attempts and therefore negative responses increases as well. This is where the conversion rate can be informative. If your cold calling only has a 5% success rate, that means the out of 100 calls, 95 will not be successes. That is a lot of frequent, even if relatively tiny, negative results. It doesn't matter how big the pay-off is, if we have to go through lots of little disappointments to get there, we don't want to go.
This asymmetry doesn't go away just because we know about it. We do most of our decision making emotionally, so even if we know intellectually that it's just a difference in frequency and magnitude that makes us loathe cold calling, it doesn't help us make more calls. Our brain understands it, but that doesn't solve the problem.
To counter this challenge, then, requires us to counteract the feelings of negative asymmetry. In effect, we must booby-trap the mind so that the small but frequent negative responses don't paralyze us. There are 4 ways you can do this:
1. Make less cold calls. The more you can minimize the frequency of negative outcomes, the better. This basically means you have to improve your conversion percentage as much as possible. Therefore, anything you can do to make less cold calls and more warm calls is a great use of your time. It can be valuable to take some of the time that you would use for cold calling and develop relationships that increase your effectiveness (your closing %) on the phone with your other calls. For example, networking or getting referrals from current clients takes an investment of time, but they can be a great way to build relationships and turn your cold calls into warm calls. This will minimize the number of negative responses you get and maximize your internal willingness to make calls.
2. Increase your skill level. Again, anything you can do to minimize the number of negative emotional responses the better. Focus on improving your conversion rate - having 5 out of 20 positive responses is better than 5 out of 50 - you'll feel much better about it which will lead to more activity. If you experience more success, you will naturally experience less activity-dampening failure. It sounds simple, and it is, but that does not mean it's easy. Spend time developing your skills on the phone. You can develop your speaking voice (tone and inflection); work on the effectiveness of your telephone scripts, or develop one if you don't have a script; you can even work on "smiling when you are dialing".
3. Fight your emotions with a constant reminder of magnitude. This is the way of resisting the downward tug of the frequent small disappointments that most people are familiar with. The most ubiquitous form of this reminder is a picture of a reward that you are working towards hung up by your phone. You can even post a copy of the paycheck you would like to receive. Another way to do this is have frequent conversations with a sales manager, colleague, or friend where they reinforce the magnitude of the positive pay-off. The goal here is to remind yourself that the magnitude of the positive outcome is so high that the little (but frequent) negative outcomes don't matter.
4. Reverse the emotional anchor. This can be the most challenging, but ultimately most effective, way of countering psychological asymmetry. Because we avoid frequent negative experiences, even if they aren't very big, the trick is to make a "no" on the phone a neutral or even positive stimulus. Two ways to do this are the They said yes method or the Calling for no's method.
In the They said yes method, every time a prospect says no on the phone, hang up the phone and immediately say "they said yes!". It's a little bit of mental trickery that you are playing on yourself, but it works if you give it time. You are re-associating the no on an emotional level with a positive outcome.
In the same way, when you are Calling for no', you set a goal for the number of negative responses you want to hear on the phone. Obviously, you don't want to have people turn you down, but using your conversion rates, you can determine how many no's you typically get for every yes. For example, if you get 3 no's for every yes, and you want to get 4 yes's in a day - you can make your goal to hear 12 no's. Then when you get a no response, it's actually moving you forward on your goal for the day.
Using these four methods, you change the underlying emotional obstacles to using the phone as a powerful prospecting tool. Even though you might not fall in love with making phone calls, you will be able to make them an important and valuable part of your business.
