Call reluctance is a ubiquitous disease among sellers, afflicting even high performers from time to time. A great description of this affliction comes from Gary Stauble, Principal Consultant for The Recruiting Lab: “Call reluctance is an emotional short circuit that diverts energy from the act of prospecting to the act of procrastinating. Instead of making calls, call-reluctant salespeople are busy preparing to prepare and avoiding the phone.”
There are any number of places to focus on the psychological source of call reluctance and great ways to attack the root cause. However, in the best cognitive-behavioral-theory fashion, I’d suggest the Lehman Brothers approach to tackling the problem head-on. (No, I don’t mean leveraging your company with meaningless derivatives to the point of bankruptcy!)
Those familiar with the Harvard Business School case on the incredible rise of Lehman’s equity research department know the tale of how in the 80’s, Research Director Jack Rivkin transformed a middling group into one that literally was the best on Wall Street.
Even though Rivkin’s equity analysts weren’t salespeople, he demanded that they make 125 calls per month to clients. More than that, he publicly posted their call volumes to the wall, and engaged positive peer pressure to insure that people got that he was serious about the requirement. It was also easy for all the analysts to see that there was a clear correlation between call volume and higher analyst ranking. When analysts who didn’t think they had the time to do that many calls saw that others did…and reaped the benefits…they got on board…regardless of the reasons for their call reluctance.
The lesson is clear for sellers, especially In an inside sales environment. When it comes to performance, there is no way around customer contact. Whatever your metric is for insuring customer contact, make sure everyone on your team knows what everyone is doing so they can make their own correlations and get over their issues.
Pin it to the wall.
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