QUESTION: Mike, I know I can do really well in this business and I tend to get paralyzed, even though I do it and push myself to do it from time to time by making marketing calls to prospects. How do you deal with that? – Anonymous
ANSWER: One of the core principles we teach in all of our coaching programs is the 3 Strategies of Marketing Without Cold Calling. This training outlines how to really warm up marketing calls. One of the techniques we go over is marketing a most placeable candidate, somebody with a great background without mentioning who they are to a list of companies. That way, you are managing responses and you are having warm calls.
I think leaving voicemails for prospects in the age we are in right now is the least effective way to do it. By this I mean, if you are leveraging an email featuring an MPC. We have been measuring the success rate of leaving voicemails that worked 10, 15, and 20 years ago and we have discovered that responses to voicemails to clients are really plummeting. We have also found that using the wrong voicemail to candidates is not working either. We are quickly migrating to text and email.
I have just coached several people through this situation. When you are in that fear mode, whatever that fear mode is, so for you, you said making calls. For some people, it is investing in their business to grow it because it touches on security. This fear usually comes down a specific limiting belief. One that a lot of us deal with is – I am not good enough.
You might not say it, but when I ask people, we just had a group call a little while ago with one of the people, and it is like, “Well, I am worried about what I am going to say, it is going to be the wrong thing, or it is not going to be good enough. I am worried that they are going to uncover I might not know what I am talking about.” All of this is an element of the limiting belief of I am not good enough.
I remember as we were talking about this on the group call and I said, “The best salesperson in recruiting or in any industry is going to fail significantly more than they are going to succeed on calls where they are talking to a prospect in which they do not know what the needs are in advance.” Even in this market, depending on your niche, it takes between 10 and 15 conversations, dialogues with employers to get an opening that you would want to search on. That person, and let us say they are a rock star and they get it down to 7, you are going to fail 6 out of 7 times. What happens is your brain picks up on that. It is just like, “Oh, I know, evidence that I am not good enough.” Number 2 did not hire me, number 3 did not hire me, number 4 did not hire me, number 5 did not hire me, number 6 did not hire me, ahh number 7 did.
What I would challenge you to do to switch this thinking is to remind yourself that you have been in the business, you have made placements. Find hard evidence of these successes because you have to prove to your brain that you are good enough and that when you do engage people it does work.
I would write down some of the clients you have brought on in the last 12 to 24 months. What was the source? Was it a cold call? Was it a referral? How did the dialogue with them go? Especially if you made the placement. It probably worked out. They probably liked you. Hopefully, they have used you again or talked about using you again. Maybe they did not need you. You start showing yourself all the evidence of why that I am not good enough argument is not true. Because all of this stuff that is occurring at a subconscious level.
It happens to all of us, by the way. How can I prove that? What I want you to think about the last time you chose to move forward in your business. You wanted to grow your business, move towards fully retained, to make an investment by bringing on a researcher, an admin, or a full-or part-time recruiter, whatever. You started really thinking about growing to a level you have never grown to before and doing some things you have never gone to do before. What we are talking about is you doing something you have never done before, meaning you do not know how to do it by nature. You can have some ideas on how to do it, but it means is you are going to be uncomfortable.
Let us say you have attended a seminar, watched a video, or done some training. You get all excited to do this and you have kind of said, “I am going to do this”, whatever this thing is. What happens the next day or within hours? Your brain starts telling you all the reasons why you cannot do it and you go into fear. It happens to all of us, and it is normal.
When I started figuring out this is just part of the process, I just started ignoring and just started saying, “It is just part of the process.” There is a really great video of an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love on how she manages creativity and fear. I thought it was brilliant. Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the author of Eat, Pray, Love. She basically says, I know for me everything I have done, fear has been attached, and I just put fear in the backseat. I am not going to spoil the rest of it because she does a really good job beefing it up. But that is really the lesson. Fear is going to be there, so just put it in the backseat behind you.
But the main thing is to move forward in this, it is healing a wound that probably occurred somewhere in childhood of not good enough. By showing yourself evidence of how you excelled in the areas you excelled and what you had to do to get to that point to say, “No. When I get people on the phone they really enjoy talking to me.” Where I tend to get rejected is they do not have an opening. Where I tend to get rejected is I do not compromise to their 15% nonexclusive 6-month money-back fee schedule. Those are the points. Just because you cannot convince them to change does not mean you are not good enough. It is just that they are not hurting enough yet.
Really, really good question, probably more than you were looking for, but I love the mindset stuff. That is actually where we are making some of the greatest progress with our clients is to get them to break through those walls of the things that hold them back.
Want to explore this in more detail? Click HERE to see how we can help.
Recent Comments