Just about every salesperson that I have ever asked has admitted to bouts of “phone fear”. Simply put this is a state of anxiety that grabs us as we reach for the phone, that makes us hesitate to pick up the phone and start dialing and starts a chain reaction in our minds that leads to procrastination and distraction. Phone fear makes any job (even rearranging your filing cabinet) more appealing than actually calling up prospects and generating some business. If professional sales people experience this, then one must feel for the entrepreneur who is in business because they had a great idea, a grand design and all they really want to do is develop a thriving business. Having to take on the sales role without an inclination for selling can be daunting and many entrepreneurs suffer bouts of phone fear. So here are a few tips that have helped me over the past twenty years or so and still do when my confidence dips and the fear takes hold.

#1 Make a game of it, imagine that you are on a reality t.v. show or in a team completing a business simulation, if you knew the whole thing was a game how differently would you react, how scared would you really be of making the call. As one of my former colleagues used to say “Fake it,til you make it”. I know it sounds a bit mad but I have used this technique over and over again. The fear just melts away in the process.

#2 Sell in half an hour chunks, and schedule the chunks early in the day. Make it your aim to just keep calling for half an hour, don’t worry about the results, they don’t matter what matters is that you don’t stop. Scribble notes as you go and do your admin once the selling is over. When you have done one half hour schedule the next one. Your only aim is to get through to clients and give it your best shot.

# 3 Challenge your negative beliefs with empirical evidence. Our negative beliefs are often played out in our minds as a critical voice, the voice that says “they wont be interested”, “your not good enough”, “everyone thinks that your being pushy”. Try my 20 Call Challenge Make twenty effective calls and keep a note of the clients reaction and see how accurate your beliefs are. During a recent sales campaign (I had a new product to take to market) I started to have doubts as to whether I was being a bit of a pain. I took the twenty call challenge and with every contact I spoke to I measured their response on a scale of 1-10, 1 being hostile 10 being welcoming with open arms. After twenty calls only one was hostile, there were no 10’s but the mode average score was 6.5. So its not true when my critical voice says no one wants to talk to me in fact only one in twenty people are hostile to the approach, the majority are reasonably approachable and willing to talk (this doesn’t mean they always want to buy your product by the way ). Negative beliefs have trouble surviving in the cold hard light of factual evidence.

# 4 Sell with some one else, time goes faster, the support is always welcome and peer pressure keeps you calling.

#5 Practice your openings and introductions. The hardest part of any cold calling is the first twenty or thirty seconds after which the nerves seem to fall away. Have a few different introductions rehearsed and ready to go so your first impression is always a good one. One of the best sales people I ever met had only three introductions which he actually kept on a piece of paper in front of him. Not once in three years did I hear him deviate from the introductions nor did he ever refer to the piece of paper. In his words the introductions were his way of easing himself into the call with confidence and the paper was merely a comfort blanket, an insurance if you will, just incase he felt nervous.

A little anxiety about sales calls is perfectly natural, in truth all the best sales people I deal with say that they feel it. I believe that some anxiety about the call shows that we care about the impact we may have on others. Sales people who have no fear generally don’t care about the clients, they care only about the sales they can make. Be aware that feeling some fear is natural, however you always have a choice about how you respond to that fear. Treat the fear as front page news and it grows, treat it as an interesting by product of how much you care about your product and your client and it becomes manageable. Your initial fears can either escalate or decline depending on how you choose to play the game.

If you have any questions about these strategies and others that can help overcome phone fear drop me aline or post them here.