What The Mile High Agony Aunt Can’t Teach You About Cold Calling

I was flying back from a small town in the South of England the other day. The flight was quite pleasant and I had just delivered a sales talk  at a quarterly sales meeting. One of the main thrusts of the talk was to help the teams to build cold calling confidence,  be more proactive and empower them to go out and win more new business.

So there I was, on the plane, drinking my coffee and reading the in-flight magazine when I chanced across a letter to a sort of Mile High Agony Aunt. It read something like this…

Dear MH Agony Aunt

I keep getting cold calls and they upset me. I’m a little mouse and I can’t say “No”. What can I do? It’s ruining my life, boo hoo.

Yours
Scared of Wimpsville

Ok! Ok! I know – getting calls at home can be upsetting for elderly people and all that but it wasn’t really the letter that interested me – it was the answer!!! It went something like this…

Dear Scared

I’m sorry to hear you keep getting cold calls. The first thing that you need to know is that cold calling is the worst job in the world. You should feel sorry for them. They are clearly not educated enough to get proper jobs. Now what you can do is… Blah! Blah! Blah!

Yours
Mile High Agony Aunt

Wow! And Wow! again. With people out there spouting verbal garbage like that is it any wonder that people who “fall into” sales jobs end up feeling a bit down on themselves. Is it surprising that cold calling confidence is at an all time low? Crikey! If you rang someone and they said, “Are you a cold caller?” and you believed that, all you’d hear is, “Are you the sh*t on my shoe?”

Don’t be a wimp, be a cold calling winner…

Now, I don’t want to get into the age old cold calling debate. that has been raging since the dawn of time…

Does it work? Doesn’t it? Should people be doing it? Is it better than…? Is it dying?

Not today anyway but I do have a message for salespeople everywhere…

Hold your head up. Take a deep breath. Remind yourself that nothing happens in business until someone makes a sale. Think of all the good things that you can manifest in your life by being a great salesperson and go out and make today a great day. If cold calling is, or should be, a part of your new business sales mix then you need to work on building your cold calling confidence.

Be a 10 and sell with passion.

It’s been over a decade since I wrote this blog post and since then many have pronounced the death of and danced on the grave of cold calling. I agree that business life is changing, I agree that sales has changed and I am at the head of the band, banging the drum that salespeople and business approaches have to change…

But this post isn’t about cold calling, it’s about sales mindset, in this case, cold calling confidence. We’ll save the cold calling debate for another day. This post is about how salespeople see themselves and it’s about how we approach our lives.

Are you going to let others look down on you and effectively change your outlook and approach to life or are you going to hold your head up high, decide what you want and commit to taking massive action? Go on, be a winner!Click To Tweet

If you want to know more about how I can help your teams make more sales, check out my latest sales motivation talks here.  And make sure that you’ve subscribed to ensure that you always get my latest insights about cutting-edge sales and success strategies, articles, audios and videos.