Articles

• Radio Interview
• Feeling Fear? Read This
• Inner Game of Recruiting
• Inner Game of Prospecting
• Are You Too Nice to Close the Deal?
• Readjusting Your Referral Thinking
• Fear-Free Prospecting: How to Do It
• Eliminate Your Call Reluctance – Elevate Yours Sales
• Stop Freezing in Front of High Net Worth Prospects
• Get Noticed: Three Keys to Effective Self-Promotion
• How Sales Shame Kills Your Prospecting And How to Stop It
• Seven Steps to Getting Psyched UP to Make Prospecting Calls
• Overcoming Sales Call Reluctance Must be Done to Build Business
• 12 Types of Call Reluctance: Are You Plagued by Any of These?
• Five Hidden Weaknesses That Keep Salespeople from Picking up the Phone

Seven Steps to Getting Psyched UP to MakeProspecting Calls

by Connie Kadansky

Are you at the top of your game when you make prospecting calls? Getting yourself psyched can increase your success rate. Here are seven ways to prepare for peak performance.

On a teleconference recently someone asked me, “What do you recommend salespeople do to get mentally prepared to make their prospecting calls?”

What a great question.

Yogi Berra once said, “Ninety percent of baseball is mental, the other half is physical.” He may have meant many things, but one thing is for certain: Mental preparation is key to prospecting success.

Think about your favorite sports team. Is it the Chicago Cubs? Phoenix Suns? How about the Pittsburgh Steelers? What do you think they do to mentally prepare for their big games?

Here are seven steps to getting psyched up to make prospecting calls:

1. Take quiet time every work-day morning. How do you start your day? Do you hit the snooze alarm more than once, listen to the latest gory world news, run out the door, stop at Starbucks for a latte, grab the Wall Street Journal, then skid into the parking lot just in time to be in your office just before the boss gets there? If you’re too busy and losing control of your day before it starts, you’re physically tense and mentally distracted. Would your favorite professional athlete start a big game day in that kind of a frenzy?
   
   Quiet time is an effective way to clear your mind and focus on what’s important. It helps you relax, refresh your inner resources, and expand your creative ability and your ability to concentrate on the task at hand.
   
   This doesn’t mean that you have to set aside an inordinate amount of time. Start slowly with five minutes and then work up incrementally until you are spending about 20 to 30 minutes in the morning in quiet time. Hear are some things you can do during your quiet time to inspire you:
   • Count your blessings. Sit down in a peaceful place with a blank notebook in front of you with pen in hand. Take a deep breath and write at the top: “I am grateful for…” and start making a list. How quickly do things pop into your mind? Get specific. Have fun with it.
   • Picture positive outcomes. Think about the most important event you have on your calendar for the day. Is it a new appointment with a referral? What do you want the outcome to be? Visualize it and play it out in your mind.
   Something wonderful happens when you quiet your mind and emotions. Perhaps you’ll get a great marketing idea; you’ll think about a particular person or even remember something important. Since you’ve cleared the mental clutter, your mind is open to new ways of viewing things. Once these refreshing ideas start percolating, the important thing to do is to act on what comes up! If a particular person’s name pops into your head, call them. Act. Move. Don’t second-guess your brilliant intuitions.
2. Always remember what you want. If you ask a professional football player what his ultimate goal for the season is, he will most likely say, “Win the Super Bowl.” If you ask him how he is going to accomplish that goal, he’ll likely list specific short-term goals. What are your goals?
   • Set long-term and short-term goals. What is your long-term goal? What are your short-term goals to get there?
   • Concentrate on what you want - not on what you don’t want. Oftentimes people place their attention on what they don’t want more than what they do want. Think about going to a really nice buffet with lots of great selections. When you go through a buffet line, you choose exactly what you want at that moment. It’s the same with your life‑it’s a very diverse and delicious buffet. You get to choose what you put on your plate.
   • Let your business plan be your guide. Mapquest has made it easier for us to find our way to new places. Do you have a “Mapquest” for your business and your life? Having a great business plan‑and referring to it often‑will help you focus on what you want to accomplish.
   • Visualize your success. Picture yourself winning a big account. Imagine the feelings you will have. If seeing is believing, you’re halfway there.
   • Create a lifestyle book. Create a book of pictures of what you want. Cut out pictures from magazines and paste them into a journal. Really. While this might sound like a great project for first-graders, it’s much more valuable than child’s play. It sets the stage for visualization and helps you make deliberate choices that put you on the path to achieving your goals. It’s very personal, and there’s no need to share it with anyone.
     
     Here are some photos to consider: the exact car you want to drive, your ideal house and neighborhood; colleges you want your children to attend; your ideal family vacation. A vision book keeps all activity and thinking going forward without wasted time, motion, or emotion. A vision book is not your lottery ticket; it is something with much better odds!
     
     I know a top producer who created just such a book that he reviews daily. He takes out pictures of what he’s already accomplished and puts in new ones that represent his upcoming goals. He has achieved his ideal, dream-come-true business, and his lifestyle book has helped him keep his eye on the prize.
3. Focus on how essential your advice is to helping people. This is a big one! When you focus on helping people, you mitigate any materialistic tendencies and make yourself more available to helping others. If you are focused on how you help people, it may shift your perspective and make any fears of rejection you might have seem petty.
   
   Concentrate on conveying your unique value:
   • If you were a prospect, why would you want to give you an appointment?
   • What’s your unique selling proposition?
   • How quickly are you establishing credibility with your prospects?
   If you are not clear on your gifts, talents, and strengths, go to www.authentichappiness.com and take the complimentary 24 VIA Strengths Inventory. It will give you your 24 top strengths. People thrive when they value the best in themselves, other people, and the world around them, affirming their past and present strengths, successes, and potentials. They discover, dream, and design their futures as opposed to getting caught up in negativity and criticism.
   
   What are your achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, high-point moments, values, competencies, insights, visions of valued and possible futures? Review your strengths, gifts, and talents prior to making prospecting calls.
4. Prepare your physical environment. If you had a multimillionaire coming into your office to meet with you, what would you do to prepare for this appointment? Do the same thing to prepare for your prospecting calls. The most important appointment you can have on a daily basis is the appointment you have with yourself to prospect.
   • Tell your assistant to hold your calls.
   • Get plenty of water to sip.
   • Go to the bathroom before you start.
   • Close your door‑even lock it, if need be.
   • Post a do-not-disturb sign. Put a sign on your door that says, “Thank you for not interrupting. I’m in an important meeting.”
   • Prepare yourself emotionally.
   • Do a check-in. Are you 100% focused on what you are about to do? If not, you have a choice to switch focus. You cannot be thinking of two things at once. Think about the person you absolutely unconditionally love. What feeling does that trigger? Love crates a feeling of abundance. Abundance creates success. Success creates self-confidence, and self-confidence creates courage. You need to put yourself in an emotional state of courage.
   • Think about how athletes use the pre-shot routine. Golfers do this on the green; basketball players demonstrate this at the foul line. Tennis players do this prior to serving. It is very individual. It can be something you think before picking up the phone. You can have a statement like “Refocus” or “I love my family” or “Breathe.” Make sure it’s positive. Don’t choose something like “Just pick up the phone, you wimp.” A self-critical routine will be detrimental.
5. Warm yourself up-literally. It has been proven that when your hands are warm, it will literally trick your brain into being calm. Prospecting rarely involves physical danger, yet some salespeople react to challenging prospecting situations as if they contained life-threatening danger. When you are fearful, you become a different person. Your body abruptly changes, invoking up to 1,400 physiological changes. Your heartbeat accelerates, pumping reserved blood supplies into your muscles and brain so you can think better. But supplying the brain with more blood has to come from somewhere. The blood is rerouted from your extremities and into your vital organs. That’s why your hands tend to turn clammy and cold when you are distressed. They have less blood to warm them.
6. Refer to prospecting activity as “appointment-getting time.” Concentrate on what you need to do. Don’t allow yourself to play the “what if” game. What star athlete goes into the game playing “what if” I lose? They are concentrating on succeeding. So many salespeople who are call reluctant call this “cold calling.” That is enough to make anyone frigid. What about “gold calling?” That’s what it is, isn’t it?
7. Realize that you are in total control of your thoughts. Realize that you are not an animal and at the mercy of the fight-or-flight response. While many responses are automatic, the perception that triggers them is not. Reread that last sentence and ponder it. You think a thought that triggers a feeling, which alters what you do. You can realign your thoughts instantaneously.

The good news is that call reluctance is nothing to be embarrassed about; living with it needlessly is. There are resources that will help you get back into the game. Play the game to win as opposed to playing the game to not lose!

Connie Kadansky is a certified coach, professional speaker, and trainer specializing in Overcoming Sales Call Reluctance®. She offers effective tools and training to diagnose Sales Call Reluctance and assists salespeople and financial advisors in highly profitable prospecting. Connie facilitates the Fear-Free Prospecting and Self Promotion Workshops® in the United States and Canada. For additional information, contact Connie at (602) 997-1101 or email her at connie@exceptionalsales.com

Sales Call Reluctance is a registered trademark of Behavioral Sciences Research Press.

Start earning what you’re worth. Solve your Sales Call Reluctance challenges today!

Call Connie Kadansky at (602) 997-1101 or fill out this convenient form The increased confidence you gain means more money in your pocket this year. Call (602) 997-1101 today.



PS If you’re not sure whether or not Sales Call Reluctance is affecting your bottom line, we’ll help you evaluate your unique situation. Call Connie at (602) 997-1101 to talk about your current sales prospecting program, today!