Getting Over Your Fear Of Cold Calling Customers

A recent research study found that 48% of business-to-business salespeople are afraid of making cold calls.

- Weldon Long

Sadly, salespeople who are afraid of making cold calls have trouble hitting their quotas, are more stressed, and are likely making less money than their counterparts who don’t share this phobia.

I don’t know who said it first — Henry Ford, Zig Ziglar, Peter Drucker, or former IBM chairman Thomas Watson Sr. — but the business wisdom embodied in these six simple words is inescapable: Nothing happens until someone sells something.

And before anyone can sell anything, someone has to generate a sales lead. Although technology can help generate leads, most of us are still going to find ourselves picking up the phone to find prospects at some point in our sales career. Doing this typically requires some amount of cold calling.

In my work with thousands of sales professionals, I have found that there are two central fears around cold calling that inhibit effective and productive lead generation results. They are:

1) fear of sounding like a sales person; and

2) fear of failure.

OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF SOUNDING LIKE A SALESPERSON

Let’s deal with the first: Overcoming the fear of sounding like a salesperson is a simple matter of accepting that you actually are a sales professional. What else are you going to sound like? A mechanic? A programmer? Here’s a news flash: Mechanics sound like mechanics. Programmers sound like programmers. And salespeople sound like salespeople.

SALES IS AN HONORABLE PROFESSION

The key to getting comfortable with sounding like a sales professional is understanding that