In my White Paper, Is Cold Calling Really Dead, Searching for the elusive ‘Silver Bullet’, I talked about the myths and truths about appointment setting and, in particular, Cold Calling. One of the points I made was about attitude and what can happen if we approach this task with dread. Here’s what I recommended to eliminate that.

If we think that cold calling is not fun, it will come across in our voices (see September 3, 2008 Blog). Here are some tips to change your attitude by making it as easy and fun as we can.

1. Track your results to make it a game, a competition, anything to make it less painful. You are competitive aren’t you?
2. Take your average size sale, and divide it by the number of dials you must make in order to get a sale (guess if you have to by thinking about the three key ratios – Dials:Conversations, Conversations:Initial Meetings, and Initial Meetings:Closes). In the example I used in the White Paper, the virtual value of each of the rep’s dials was $250. Would you pick up the phone if someone would give you $250 each time you did? Well, if you imagine a ‘Virtual Bank’, that’s exactly the way it works. You just have to close the sale to get the bank to release the funds.
3. Remember, if it were that easy, anybody could do it and we wouldn’t make as much money as we do (or can), so take the good with the bad and get after it.