Get Your Yoga On While Cold Calling
I was working out to my Baron Baptiste yoga video this weekend, getting my sweat on (save the sarcastic remarks please). Like most yoga gurus, Baron provides his words of wisdom throughout the video regarding the movements he’s putting our body through. Combined with the movements, he also stresses that our minds should be focused on a certain point and not scattered during each pose. He describes each session as ‘practice’, and as a result of this practice, we are building our yogi skill set. Effectively he is looking for us to increase our physical and mental endurance, as well as muscle memory to handle each pose. This practice overtime helps to develop what he calls “unconscious competence”.
I’ve always found that when I’m most effective on the phone is when I’m in a flow. If I’m doing a real-time critique of my performance, I rarely end up delivering my message as cleanly as I would like. It may sound like an odd statement, but you’re better off not ‘over thinking’ when you have a prospect on the phone. If you’ve taken the time to prepare for each call, once you have your decision maker live, it’s best to work from your muscle memory. For me, once the muscle memory takes over we’re in our flow- A.K.A “unconscious competence zone”. We can always save the self-critique for after the call.
In cold calling it’s essential to get yourself desensitized to rejection. To a degree, you have to turn off your standard emotions and shift them into cold calling mode. Sure it’s natural to have a negative emotional reaction when not getting what we want from a prospect; we just need to tweak our hardwiring a bit to anticipate this… without removing our personality and sounding like a drone of course.
Think of every sales situation as “practice”. You know what you know. As long as you’re prepared, you WILL be successful. The more practice you put in means you’re building that muscle memory and your unconscious competence will take over. Now pick up and make it happen!
Namaste