Making Hard Calls – Day 24 of 31

Cold calls are one of the hardest things to do in a job setting. Calling people who didn’t ask for your call and requesting something of them.

Some people may think that they’re a necessary evil, others might think that if they needed something, they would have called you, you didn’t need to call them. As always, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

For the first, if it’s a necessary evil, why does it have to be evil? Is there not a way to make it harmless or is there not a better way that you could market to people that don’t know about you?

For the second, if you know you’ll call when you need something, how will you ever find out about that thing that will save you 100s of hours a year if someone doesn’t call and tell you about it? If you say that you’ll find it if you think you’ll need it, how much time are you having to spend looking for something that you could be spending on something else?

On top of this, there may straight up be things that you didn’t even think existed that could save you all kinds of time that you didn’t even know about.

Maybe hardest of all are cold calls to the people you know. I’ve done this a couple times in my life. Once to ask people to subscribe to an email list I was putting together for a podcast, another time to ask about joining a discipleship group I was doing with my wife (spoiler, I’ve been doing that one this week).

It’s awkward because no longer are you calling complete strangers who you know you’ll never have to see again, you’re calling people who, if you ruin your reputation, may not look at you the same way again.

I think anyone who doesn’t like cold calling should have to make at least 100 cold calls sometime. Just to feel the pain. If you think you’re in pain answering cold calls, imagine having to make 50 of them a day and getting rejected over and over again.

It feels bad, and it’s one of the hardest things I (a world-class people pleaser) have ever done.