The Entrepreneurial Savant

Every salesperson knows what a ‘cold call’ is. Its a telephone call to someone you don’t know that you make for purpose of furthering your cause. If you’re selling something, you may be seeking an appointment to make a presentation. If you’re raising money for a cause you may have a similar goal. If you’re trying to learn about a new career or resource you may simply be trying to find the right expert for advice. Whatever the reason you make the calls, they are often the only way you can accomplish your goal(s). Unfortunately a very human and common fear of rejection keeps most of us from making cold calls and we get stuck, unable to make forward movement.
There are many methods of beating the fear. Use a script so that when fear freezes you up, you can keep going with what you wanted to say. Rehearse your script ahead of time with a co-worker or spouse. Find common ground ahead of time through research so that you can turn a feared encounter into an opportunity to share interest. Most importantly, make a certain number of ‘cold’ calls everyday. These shots into the dark can lead to many new resources and profitable relationships.
Give yourself an incentive to make your calls everyday. Think of them the way a salesperson might. A good cold caller knows exactly how many calls they need to complete to make an appointment and how many appointments it takes to make a sale. Knowing their average profit on each sale, they can assign a dollar value to each and every call, no matter how successful. For instance a real estate agent may call on homeowners to get houses to list and sell. She knows that for every twenty calls she completes (reaches a person), she gets one appointment. One half of her appointments result in listings for which she averages a commission of $1500 each. The math shows each call she makes to be worth $37.50. ( 40 calls = 2 appointments = one listing @ $1500. 1500/40=37.50) It kinda warms up those cold calls doesn’t it? Take your goals and reduce them to the value of a phone call done three times a day, day after day. The value of each of those dials may be a pleasant surprise.

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A lot of us don’t understand the concept of profit, in spite of growing up in a capitalist economy. We earn our wages based on an hourly or yearly figure and hope for raises or bonuses. When you go into business for yourself and that paycheck stops coming in like clockwork, the profit concept becomes a lot more important. When you price something, basing your price on your overhead and paying yourself a reasonable wage, always add in a figure above and beyond for profit. As obvious as it sounds, many of my self-employed friends fail to mark up their services. Profit is the future of your business. It pays for the bigger projects, it pays back loans, it creates equity and it provides an incentive. The profit motive has turned out to be a very effective motivator. Remember the USSR?

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There is a good business reason why employers give people vacation time and often require them to use it by a certain date. It’s not just because the employees expect it as a perk of their jobs. Vacation is a time to recharge your engines and regain your long term perspective. It is a time to step off the day to day treadmill, no matter how exciting, and re-orient your life in a different mode. Those of you who are workaholics who never can find time to take vacations are probably getting less real work done than the worker who understands the place of getting away from it all. Workaholism was glorified in the go-go eighties as the way to get ahead. We also coined the phrase, ‘working vacation’, in which you transport your work environment to a more scenic locale. This defeats the purpose of vacationing.
When things are out of control or you cannot seem to make any forward movement, get out of town. The key is to change environments completely for an extended (more than a weekend) period of time. If you work in a rural environment, this might mean heading off to NY or LA for a dose of the big city. For those of us poking at keyboards all day it might mean going out and learning how to climb rocks or developing a physical skill. Even if you just head out to a campsite on a hill and stare at a fire all night, you’re going to receive big benefits. To repeat: Energy, Perspective, Inward Contemplation, Physical Exercise, etc. Successful people make the time to get away.

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Always return calls as soon as possible, starting with the worst ones first. It is amazing how many creditors, irate family members and people on deadlines just need to know you will return their calls. Remember, when you return someone’s call quickly, you are instantly higher on their respect list because everyone else procrastinates. We live in a society with a very short attention span and the person who responds more quickly will be more successful. Those who hesitate or put things off will be lost in the shuffle.

And, if you’re competing for someone’s business, a fast response can mean getting the business. In many cases even a higher quote that is turned around quickly is preferable to a cheap quote that shows up weeks later. As the cliche goes, time is money, and a fast response is a positive indicator of how your business relationship will develop.

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