Day One: FEAR

I'm not going to lie to you. I have call reluctance. I had call reluctance when I telemarketed in college. I had call reluctance when I sold insurance and I have call reluctance now.

What is call reluctance?

It's when you are scared and have high anxiety that little monsters will come pouring out of the phone and eat you. :) No, but seriously the phone does get very heavy and its gets very very hard to make calls.

Call reluctance is the #1 reason for failure in sales and business. Did you know that? When sales people cripple up with fear that they cease to do the activity that is required for success.

Day ONE for me on the calling boot camp was no different. I hemmed and I hawed and I made a plan, and I checked it twice and I looked all around town to find out who was naughty and nice and came home to find my wife looking at me with her arms crossed......

and she says: "Are you going to do what you said you're going to do?"

It reminded me alot of when I was a little kid standing on the diving board and staring down at the water....crippled with fear to jump....until little miss fearless pants sneaks up behind me and shoves me in!

In all sincerity, I did get motivated to finally pick up the phone and make 125 calls today.

These leads were 6 months old, and were double-opt-in leads. (Which basically means they clicked on an ad requesting stay-at-home business information TWICE) These are considered cheap-leads and 9 times out of 10 the prospect doesn't even remember clicking the little ad on the computer and putting their information into the computer. So.......needless to say I knew this was going to be a tough climb today.

Here are the results:

11 Not Interested

27 Disconnects

18 Wrong Numbers

5 Interested

64 Voice Messages left

Notice anything? The numbers don't lie. I was expecting 3% and that's about what I got out of 125 calls. Now the rest is in the follow-up.