I was coaching a rep once who had gotten into a rut. Every call seemed to end the same way. Voicemail. “Not interested.” “Call me next quarter.” After listening for a while, I finally asked him what he thought was happening.
He didn’t hesitate, “Nobody wants to talk to salespeople anymore.”
That’s a pretty big conclusion from a handful of phone calls.
So I asked him to humor me. “Let’s pretend that’s not true for the next hour.”
He laughed.
“I’m serious,” I said. “For one hour, let’s assume people actually want help if we happen to call them at the right time with the right idea.”
He thought I was nuts.
I didn’t change his script. We didn’t modify his prospect list. The only thing that changed was the conversation he was having with himself before he dialed.
About forty minutes later he got someone on the phone. They talked for a few minutes. It wasn’t a home run. It didn’t turn into an appointment.
But when he hung up he looked over at me and said, “That felt…different.”
It was! Not because the customer was different, because he was.
I’ve thought about that conversation a lot over the years because I think we all do it. We decide how the day is going to go before the first customer ever says hello. We convince ourselves people are too busy, nobody returns calls anymore, prospects don’t answer unknown numbers, decision makers don’t have time.
Maybe all of that is true sometimes.
The problem is, once we’ve decided it’s true, we start sounding like we believe it.
That’s the part customers hear.