“There is no easy way of letting go your self-esteem and ego to make a call to a random person at a (carefully calculated but still very much) random timing”
Of course the answer in your head must have been an unapologetic YES. Because on an average we attend almost 5–6 irrelevant phone calls for products like credit cards, loans and porting from airtel to vodafone (or vice versa).
We are always short of time and we are constantly rushing towards something or the other. The pressure to keep up with gym schedule is mounting up and the FitBit data proves that money spent on the fancy device has done no good. I need to complete so many online courses and I am yet to read all those business magazines that I subscribed to on 1st January. But that is the least of my worries because I have no clue what new password had I set for my internet banking due to which my 5 credit card bills still remain unpaid.
Amidst all this frenzy, some awkward sounding trainee telecaller wants me to buy yet another credit card so that they can meet THEIR targets!
I obviously have the right to hang up on her or shout at him! These people have no right to sneak into my schedule and steal my time. Yes, it is their job, but what about me? And can’t they care to know better and crunch their product description into 2 lines?
You have dialed a vodafone number, and yet you are asking me to port to vodafone at least 3 times a day!!! This is insane and the telecaller has access to all the data in the world but does not bother to put an effort in striking my name off that STUPID CALLING LIST which is circulated among the whole batch of fresher telecallers…
But today, I lost all the above reasons to bash or hang up on tele-callers. Not that I now get lesser number of calls or I have a diluted time schedule or true-caller has made my life a bliss.
But because now on I myself had to start cold calling clients to sell.
That’s the only part of ‘entrepreneurship’ which is so non-fancy and there is no theory by which you can master it in the first go.
There is no easy way of letting go your self-esteem and ego to make a call to a random person at a (carefully calculated but still very much) random timing.
Cold-messaging makes me less guilty because the other person still has a choice to, not spend time on it, if he or she is super busy in rocket-launch level business activities. Linkedin now gives us the luxury of sitting with the laptop, typing some message and feeling satisfied that we may have ‘reached out’ and made more than 1000 ‘impressions’. You can put those numbers on slideshows and prove how it boosted your website views and perhaps sign-ups.
I became an entrepreneur from a product manager’s profile and started out with the belief that digital marketing is a smarter replacement of sales outreach.
I assumed if I will build a rockstar product, it will speak for itself and get itself sold. #b2bmyths
But all business people know reality is nowhere close to that, especially in case of B2B sales. As Gary Vaynerchuk puts it bluntly, there no f***ing merit in any product — sales is just another human decision filled with all sort of biases and irrationality.
And after this humbling experience of making 10 cold calls yesterday, I now pledge to respectfully deny the telecallers that I am NOT their target audience.
In fact, to better utilize my time I have decided to request them to train me for free. Today I took some tips from a insurance telecaller on how to handle rejections 🙂
Author: Deepika Anu Sharma, Co-Founder – Ntalents.ai (NSRCEL Incubatee)
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