[00:00:00] Darryl Praill: My name is Darryl Praill. I'm your host and you, my friend, well, you and I we're gonna go on a journey every single week, talking to the industry's most accomplished sales legends, as they share with us, their tips, their tricks, their techniques, and their tactics to becomes sales rockstars. You simply need to do what they're doing and you will achieve similar nirvana. If you like to laugh, you like to be entertained, if you'd like to go off on tangents and tell stories, you're going to love what you're going to hear next. Sit back, relax, it's going to get real.

How is everybody doing today, folks? Oh my goodness. You ever notice? I kind of start out every podcast the same for, for, for like episodes upon episodes upon episodes. I used to strain myself and say, I gotta open it up differently today. I gotta do it differently today. Today. I'm gonna say something like I, and then I, of course I blank.

And then I fall back to. How's it going today, folks. Right. And it's funny, cuz I was the same in my webinars for years, I would do my webinars and no matter who, when I have my own agency and no matter who is my client, I would open it up this way. Tell me if, if this is stupid or, or why not, but here we go, go back 10 years ago and this is what you would've heard me said.

I would've said good morning, good evening. Good afternoon. No matter where you are in this fine land of ours, my name is Dar I'm your host. And today we're gonna talk about whatever it is we talk about. Welcome to this show. That's what I would say. And the only way I would mix it up is if I was having a conversation with somebody who was in the UK.

So for example, then instead of saying, good morning, I might say good afternoon or good evening first. I know I am tricky Dicky with all my cool antics. Aren't I, you know what it is, what you're hearing me talk about and share is an honest, truthful statement that we all get into. We all get into routines of what we say, how we do, how we, how we greet one, another, our default behaviors, right?

Like we're an autopilot. I mean, you know, the drill, if I'm walking down the street, except of course, if I may say in New York city, I would look at you and say, Hey, how you doing? As we walk past each other? Or we just give each other that, that knowing nod dudes are especially good for this, that nod, which is nod, right?

It's that sign of respect. Remember teaching my, my son the first time. He was in high school and he missed the bus and the high school was like a 45 minute drive away. And he, I think he was maybe 15 years old and you know, we, we live in the country. So he born and raised in the country, never really taken a bus.

A city bus in his life. Every single urban person here is, is already rolling their eyes. I hear you. But he was scared shitless cuz I, as the father, when he missed the bus said, well, then I guess you better figure out how you're gonna get home son click. And my wife is freaking out behind me cuz she's like, what are you doing?

He's never done this before. And I'm like, well, he is gonna figure it out. And then. You know, he figured out the bus route, he had some money on him. He calls me back and he goes, I'm taking the bus and this what I'm doing, but you could see, he was nervous. He was scared. And I said to him, I said, listen, you're gonna go and transfer buses at a very rough neighborhood.

It's all about how you carry yourself, kid. If you look like you're weak and, and, and you're. Insecure and you are scared. They're gonna kick your ass and steal your lunch money. But if you, you know, shoulder us back, look people in the eye and give them the nod. Give them the nod. No one will touch you. And he got home. The, and mom was no longer upset with dad and the kid grew three inches that day in his self-confidence. It's crazy.

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These are the things that we endure in life. We endure. These habits, these tendencies to fall back on, well known scripts, these areas where we're scared crapless, but we know we have to do it. And if we don't approach it right, we're gonna fail. All of this is coming together somewhere. My friends is coming together because today I'm talking about a topic.

Every single sales rep on here. Absolutely loves cannot do enough of, you know what that's right. Your favorite topic, your favorite activity, the favorite way to build your pipeline. Let me cold call somebody. I love me some cold calling. And then of course, when it happens, what do we do? We fall back on our scripts, the scripts that we know don't work.

but if we're comfortable with them and then our voice is like, we're looking down to the ground, scared, scared shitless, please don't look at me, please. Don't ask me a hard question and they can feel it in the phone. They know that you have no idea what you're doing and you're going, and they say, go. and at the end of the day, you're like that sucked.

So the question boys and girls sales reps of all sizes in ages and location is how do you consistently turn up and do what many consider to be an unpleasant task? And that. That is cold calling. So who would you ask that question to? Well, I think it's only reasonable that we go to the one, the only. The original phone Jacker.

That's right. Boys and girls. We're talking to Callum Becroft today, all the way from London, England, you can check him out at the phone. Jacker do co UK, but he lives on LinkedIn. Callum. Becroft when we're check him out there, he is a pretty cool cat. If you go to his website, one of the things I really like about him right on the homepage, this is right away.

It's it's a tone. It's a vibe. It's a feeling, right? He says, Hey, I'm Callum a freelance sales development rep. You may know the role as a BDR lead generation. New business development are quite possibly something else, but either way, my job is to knock down doors and get you in front of the prospects you want to meet with.

And that includes the unpleasant task of cold calling, and he's gonna make it all better for us today. Callum, welcome to the show.

[00:06:41] Callum Beecroft: Thanks for having me. Yeah. It's a pleasure to be here.

[00:06:43] Darryl Praill: I saw nothing but smiles in your face of, so I was doing that little opening monologue. What was going through your mind? This guy talks a lot or what?

[00:06:51] Callum Beecroft: I was just loving it. I was just putting myself in your son's shoes. Just thinking what a great role model love got.

[00:06:58] Darryl Praill: True story. My wife was so upset with me and I'm like, he's great. 10 he's 15 years old. He's gotta learn. You gotta keep times we've saved his ass so many times there's gotta, eventually there's gotta be a consequence or this behavior will continue.

And you know, between, you know, as every good parent listening knows. Ultimately, we'll never let our kids get into a situation that will put them an unnecessary risk, but sometimes the hardest lessons to learn the ones that are most important are the ones that are scariest. And he came out of that a better person.

So we took a picture, honest to good, as we would pick him up. He's at the bus station. There's like a 10 minute drive from our house and we took a picture of him. And we're like, this is the day son that you became a man way to go. So great. Anyway. So talk to me about this. Talk to me about, you know, that the unpleasant task of cold calling, I mean, is that something I'm assuming that's something you can relate to, but what is it you hear?

What, what, when you talk to your peop your clients, when you talk to other reps, What is the general consensus about the whole process of cold calling? Because I know I get a lot from, from a lot of 'em is saying Darryl, nobody even uses the phone anymore. The phone is dead. Why would I ever use that?

And I don't know, half the time, if they're telling me the truth meaning the phone is dead or that's just their excuse because they genuinely do not want to use the phone. So I'd love to hear your take.

[00:08:20] Callum Beecroft: Yeah, that's a good question. Well look, let me answer it by this. The, the phone's definitely not.

So I would say, yeah, from the sales reps that are saying, this is definitely an excuse, not to pick up the phone. Right. But you also see a lot on LinkedIn as well from decision makers who would be prospects and they receive a lot of cold calls and there's a lot of bad mouthing of salespeople on LinkedIn.

But what I would take from that is the CEOs primarily, or MDs or presidents or whatever, or C C level decision makers. Don't necessarily hate cold calls. They just hate bad ones. And the problem is most cold calls are bad ones. So we see all of this on LinkedIn, all of this negativity and people read it and think, well, yeah, no one likes to be cold cooled.

But from my experience, I'd probably say about 5% of the prospects I call will just be a straight off the bat. No, not interested. Maybe they'll hang up or they'll ask me to take 'em off their list. But the other 95% we'll have a convers. They might not lead somewhere, but at least like we're having a conversation on the phone.

So I think that's a significant stat to kind of debunk the myth that the phone doesn't work. Right. And what I'd add to that as well is you you've got mobiles, right. And some people or prospects, they won't answer unsolicited numbers. But you've always got the, the office number. Right. So if you can't get through to someone on their mobile, then you can always try the.

There really isn't an. For the phone doesn't work or cold callings dead. It's definitely not my experience.

[00:09:49] Darryl Praill: And, and that is something I do here over and over again, not just from other sales coaches and, and experts, but even from so many of my colleagues who like me carry a budget to spend on investments, whether that be services or technology or whatever.

And the phone is not. And in fact, often we prefer the phone. Especially if we're actively looking, it's like, why are we going back and forth on LinkedIn messaging and why, or, or on emails, can we just pick up the phone? Cause there's just gonna be a shit load faster. My schedule's already full. So, and then we can decide if we like each other or not next steps are not, but at least we'll have resolution and it can, we can respectively go on our way.

So that to me is, is a proof point. So let's set the stage. You heard the opening monologue. Many of us are totally. I don't know, we just start getting the shakes. We start hyperventilating. When we know we're gonna have to start doing the calls, we'll do emails. We'll do social selling hell. We might even make videos anything, but to pick up the phone.

So let's just sit back. You've got a whole bunch of Wisdom lessons learned that will make this a much better experience for us. So where do you wanna start my friend?

[00:10:57] Callum Beecroft: Yeah. So I think the first thing was around kind of measuring the wrong thing, but also not setting targets and not setting goals.

Right. So, and this is my own personal experience, right. Is when I was before I went self-employed and I was an employee. I would never kind of measure anything. Well, first and foremost, I never picked up the phone. Right. I was too scared to do it, but I didn't know how to prospect using the phone. So I'd always rely on email and somehow I survived for a certain amount of time, but the principal still, still the same.

Right. I never had any idea of why I was prospecting, what I was looking for. And I had no idea how many emails at the time I needed to se send. To schedule one meeting. Right. So I would do a little bit of email one day, perhaps none, the next I'd do a little bit more on the Wednesday and then perhaps none on the Thursday and then maybe I'd do lows on the Friday or whatever.

So I never had a target or an understanding of kind of the math of sale. Right. And cold callings the same. Right. So one of the things that you see quite a bit is people measure dials. They won't measure. Oh, sorry. They'll measure dials in sometimes conversation time. I think the conversation time is more of an old school like call center or perhaps, I don't know if it's still prevalent now, but in recruitment as well, they used to measure, call time as well.

Now the problem with that is I could make nine dial. No one answers, but I've done 9% of my task. If I was going to set myself a hundred dollars for that day. Right. But nothing's happened. Same with conversation time. I could speak to someone for 10 minutes on the phone, but really, really deep down after one minute, I know this isn't gonna go anywhere.

So you measure all of this wrong INAC activity. And then by the end of it, you think you've done something, but actually like the needle hasn't moved. So the number one thing I would suggest with cold calling is to measure conversations because you can measure, you can control that and you can track that, right?

So I don't know if your target is five conversations a day, then it might take $50. It might take $20. You never know. Right. But you can control that. So you can just keep going until you've hit your conversation. Target. Now you can take it one step further, right? Is going back to the point about understanding activity and how much you need to do to set the meeting.

Because if you're an SDR, right? That's your job is to set meetings, ideally qualified meetings. But if I know the one in 10 conversations is gonna lead to a meeting historically, and I know that I need to set five meetings, a. Then, if I consistently deliver 10 conversations every single day, I'm gonna hit my target and you can control that.

Right? So all of that anxiety and the fear of kind of doing cold calling and basically a lack of feeling like a lack of control over the activity, you can take control of that. Buy, understanding your math of sale and what you need to do consistently to hit it.

[00:14:01] Darryl Praill: So I had this conversation recently with another revered reputable individual in the sales world.

I won't name their name. Just because it's not relevant, but we had this whole conversation about how many connect, what's the typical connection rate, right? So you talk about sales, math, and their contention was well. 20% of the time somebody's gonna answer a phone. And my contention was, well, I think it's more like 8% of the time give or take.

And we're, we're being general. Yeah. You know, across the board. Well, let's say, let's say it's 10% for simple math. So if every 10th call somebody answers the phone and using Callum's math, I need to have five conversations. Then theoretically, I need to have 50 dials to have 10 conversations so that I can hit my number.

That's what he means about the simple map. The beauty of knowing the map is that you have an end in sight, you know, the effort involved, you know, how long it typically takes you to work through that. And if you know that, then it's not so scary. And then you can shift your mindset so that you're prepared to do that.

That's all, this is, it's all. This is no N different than my son getting the mindset than when he was gonna transfer our buses. He wasn't gonna get his ass handed to him or his lunch money taken away. It's a mindset. And he knew he had to go from point a to point B by time, he got to point B. He was through the scary part and he was onto the rest of his day.

So I loved your point about having goals and measuring it for me as a sales leader. I recognize many of my sales colleagues, my sales leadership colleagues do measure activity. I don't, I prefer outcomes. Give me a conversation. I recognize one. Conversation's gonna be 30 seconds long. The next one could be 10 minutes long.

The 32nd one could be one saying, yeah, I'm interested. I'm busy right now. Call me back tomorrow. 30 seconds done. And the 10 minute one could be, just be a tire kicker because they're bored as hell. Duration. I agree with you doesn't matter, but gimme the conversations and the beauty of that is if it only takes you 25,000 instead of 50 to get those five or those 10 conversations, whatever it is, you want knock yourself.

Oh, you gotta keep on going and, and really suck up and, and build your, your pipeline or move on to something else. But to me, I'm with you on that cam I love the math because it makes it, it makes it obvious. It takes the scariness out of it. Absolutely. But that's not it. Because I could do that, but you're gonna talk to me about how not having a process is like, you're gonna still kick you in the ass, even if you do know the numbers.

[00:16:39] Callum Beecroft: Yeah, absolutely. So to your point that you just mentioned there with conversations as a sales rep, you've gotta be. You've gotta be not hard on yourself, but you've gotta be strict with your activity. Right? So in my eyes, the conversation is going back to your point about process is understanding what you are doing and why you're doing it.

Right? So for me, the purpose of a cold call is to uncover the truth. And the truth is, does this prospect have problems that I can fix? If not, why not? Is that ever gonna change? I, should I ever call this prospect back or is there a timeframe maybe in three months time or six months time, I should call this pro prospect back.

So I'm uncovering some information there. Now, if I find a prospect who has problems that I can fix, my job is now changed to get them slightly emotional about those problem. And if I can do that, I know the chances of me getting a meeting with them are gonna be a lot higher. Right. And there's also, if you can get someone emotional about those problems, there's gonna be more of a reason for them to turn up to the meeting and you'll get a lot, lot less back ups as well.

So I've seen stats. The, I don't know, I think it's 40% of meetings result in a no show. Really, it should never happen if you do your job right. So that's kind of the, the overarching thing. So when I'm going back to the measurement piece, when I'm measuring my conversations, they've gotta be with decision makers, right.

I don't wanna meet with managers or anyone. Isn't gonna have a final say of whether they move forward with this. So it is gotta be with a decision maker, obviously from the nature of the conversation. You'll realize whether they're the right company to be speaking to, but you should know that already. And yeah, if I can figure out all of those things, whether one.

They should be someone if they don't have problems now that I should call back or not. If they, if they are someone, when, when would it make sense what event is happening in the future? That means that that would make more sense to have a conversation. And then obviously finding those that actually have problems that, that we can fix and, and have a conversation with them about it.

So yeah, you've gotta be really hard on yourself. That's the first bit, I don't know if you wanted to interject there. I don't have a point.

[00:18:47] Darryl Praill: Well, no, I love what you're getting at because I actually did a post on this just, or was it a comment? I can't remember. It might have been a comment. It was a comment actually on a post that my good friend, Jenny Brennan posted on.

And she was talking about you need to sell to the situation and not to the sales stage. That was her whole point. And I'm like, Take any sales methodology you want to, and I just pick some at random, we'll say, spin, what does the S stand for situation? Spiced. What is the Stanford situation, even medic or med pick.

Right. I identify right. So I could go on, but you're, you're identifying the pain points, which is eliciting an emotional reaction. Yeah. And I don't understand why so many reps honestly have a hard time with this because there is a thousand sales frameworks out. Eh, give or take that you can use, but they're all kind of the same.

And they walk you through to help you qualify to help you uncover the situation they're in and evoke that emotional response. All you need to do is a. You put the time in the, the, the, the, the math behind the cold calling and then B follow the process. You guys are making this so hard on yourselves because you don't wanna put the math in and you just wanna weigh it.

You don't wanna follow the process.

[00:20:12] Callum Beecroft: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, you write some good points there because I think a couple of things, the reasons why salespeople make it so hard for themselves is one of, is a lack of understanding. We've all been on the receiving end of perhaps a cold call or a cold email where sales reps are lazy.

They just talk about what it is they do, who they do it for and what perhaps the benefits of them, right? The features of answers, benefits. And the problem with that is the people don't buy features of is the benefits. And. What further compounds it is, is likely the, the reps listen to this, you're gonna have competitors and they're gonna be doing the exact same thing.

They're gonna be talking about the exact same thing. So there's no, no differentiation or competitive advantage there. Right. So, yeah, they're quite lazy and they just look at the surface level of their world. Right. And they're so wrapped up in their own world with their. And you need to shift away from that and start thinking about your prospects world.

And obviously if you are a fresh out of college or university going into a sales job, you are not gonna have any experience or understanding of what it's like to be a CEO or an MD or president or whatever, or a. Marketing officer or financial director and all these jobs. So it's really hard to put yourself in their shoes and understand what's their world.

Like what are their biggest pains, frustrations, and how does your product or service solve some of those pains and frustrations? Right? So that's the sphere that you need to be thinking about. And once you do that, you can start having conversations about their world, right? decision makers and whoever you're calling up, they don't give a rats as about your world, your products, your services, who, what clients you have worked with, all they care about is how you can help them.

So you gotta really focus on that side of the kind of prospecting and, and selling and having conversations around that rather than what it is you do. Because the cold calls that I make, I never talk about what it is I or my clients do. Right. We just talk about their. Problems in their world. What have they done to try and fix it?

Has that worked? What impact does it have on the business? Is it costing them a lot of money? Is this something they even want to fix? And also, how does it make them feel? Obviously if that problem is big enough, right? So, yeah, I don't talk about. Features advantages, benefits or anything that I do is all about the prospect and all that, all about how I might be able to help them.

There's obviously no guarantees in, in life. Right?

[00:22:41] Darryl Praill: So I, I wanna stop here for a second because you have a unique perspective that I think is worthy of bringing up that we, we already have a chance to address many people here. You hit it up, you maybe you're fresh outta school and you don't have that real world experience.

You don't know how to speak to that managing director, that CEO. Head of finance, whomever. It might be, cause you don't have the life experience. You just don't understand it. And for many people that becomes an excuse. Okay. I, I hear you. It's it's a valid excuse. Let's just table that for a moment. Let's talk about Callum.

Remember how this began. I talked to you about Cal. I said, he's the phone Jacker. You can go to phone Dr. Doco at UK. And I, I read a little bit of his website and what, what he says. Ray says I'm Calum a freelance. Sales development rep. In other words, every time Callum brings on a new client, he's selling something.

To somebody that he's likely, never sold before and quite likely speaking to people he's never engaged with before different verticals, different industries, et cetera. So if Callum can make his living doing this, then there's no excuse for you. He's just killed your excuse. So let me ask you this column.

How do you do that? How do you take on a new client selling a product or a service you've never, you know, you have minimal to no exposure to, into an audience you may have never talked to before.

[00:24:10] Callum Beecroft: That is a very good question. So yeah, whenever I'm meeting with new prospects, so this is a sales meeting or a disco, whatever you wanna call it we'll have that initial discussion and then if they wanna move forward, we have a, a follow up call.

And on that follow up call, we go through a step by step process. Of what their strategy is. So obviously in my client's world they might want to focus on a specific product or service, or I don't know, another example would be, they want to target like higher value prospects, right? Maybe they've got sales guys, but they've struggling to unlock these bigger clients.

So we'll understand what their strategy is and what their goals are. And after that, I need to get a really good understanding from them. What. Or what are the pros, the problems that their product or service fixes, but in their prospects world. Right? So it's gotta be very specific to their prospects world.

And once we've done that, then I need to understand how does it manifest itself in the prospects world. So I don't know, let's pretend I was bringing on a marketing agency, right. And let's say they focus very specifically on SEO. That seems to be quite a popular marketing agency. Now I'd need to get an understanding of all the problems.

Their prospects or their current clients had before they worked with them. So it might be the they had a previous agency who were missing deadlines or they were a nightmare to work with. It might be the, they've just got a lack of performance, right? The, perhaps they're just not getting the, the Google search hits that they want, or it could be something else and they don't need to figure out how it manifests itself in their world.

So are they doing this themselves? Do they have someone in. Perhaps that person's left and there's a gap in the business and they need this work done. Or perhaps they're already working with another agency and they're having issues, or I don't know, maybe the agency's been struggling and they've shut down or whatever.

So I need to understand all of this picture of what are the likely conversations that I'm gonna be having with that prospect. And then I'll just adapt my. Cold call framework. And I'll just fill in the gaps, right? So for every client, for all of the cold calling that I've done, I use the same process all the way through.

It's just the context of what I'm talking about. And the questions I ask will change for every single one of them. And then after that, it's just a case of getting on the phone. There'll always be some things that I don't get right. First time. So I might need to tailor it or change. Or there might be specific kind of objections that I'm hitting that I'm like, I don't understand this world well enough to figure out.

So I just have a conversation with my client, try and fix that and then get back on the phone and it's just constant work. Right. And you just get better at it with every conversation. So, yeah, that's what I would do.

[00:26:50] Darryl Praill: So let, so let's recap account just said here. Okay. Many of you hate cold calling. For all the reasons we talked about, it's scary.

It doesn't work. It's a stupid channel. Phone is dead, whatever. Just table that for a moment. What did Callum say? He did a couple simple things. In fact, what I call was I heard three things. I heard him say three things. I heard one say, I just asked a shit load of questions and I got to know. The target audience.

I just asked, I didn't wait for it to be spoon fit to me. I didn't wing it. I didn't take a shortcut. I didn't try to cheat. I asked, in fact, he even said if I had to, I would go back to the client and ask more questions if I didn't understand it because he understands time is money for him. Just like, by the way, time is money for you folks because it's your commission check.

So he asked a lot of questions. Point number one, point number two, he did was he heard him say I use the same framework for every. He, he has the same framework. So it's not just enough to know who it is. You're selling into ask a lot of questions. You need to be ly familiar with the framework. And I even talked about that.

You know, I talked about disco and, and qualification, which is part of a framework, but it's a routine. He knows this funnel, math. We talked about that he knows how to engage with them, to get the answers he needs to enlist that emotional response. And the last thing he talked about was, and he didn't use this word, but I'm gonna paraphrase for him.

Difficult preparation. He was prepared for every time. He commenced that calling session because he would review those notes and the value props and everything else. And again, he knew his funnel math and his funnel. Math may vary from customer to customer because one product could be a niche product.

Another one could be mainstream and, but that's all preparing. Mindset, et cetera. So would it be a fair point Callum to say, if you hate cold calling, it's, there's a good chance that not only are you not measuring and setting goals and targets, as you talked about, but you're also suffering from a poor process or a lack of preparation or a lack of understanding of, of, of your buyer.

[00:28:52] Callum Beecroft: Yeah, absolutely. I, I think cold calling is exactly the same as going to the gym in that no one wants to do. When you get there, you're fine. Halfway through. You want to quit by the end of it. by the end of it. You feel good, right? And then once you start seeing results, you get motivated to do more, right.

But just like the gym, you need to be doing it consistently. And like all the things that we talked about, preparation mindset, having a process understanding what you are doing and tracking. Once you do all of those, then like you get the results at the end and it motivates you to do more of it.

Right. So for me personally, I, I don't love cold calling. I love how hard it is because it's challenging. Right. And it, and it makes me think and it's a difficult one to, to. Like you need discipline. Right? So it's constantly making me think about how do I act and behave outside of cold calls on the topic of this to turn up consistently.

Right. And obviously there are so many benefits, but I don't have any pressure. Even when I bring on a new client, now I've done it enough that I've heard it all before. I can see where the challenges might come. And I know what's gonna happen if I do hit any brick walls, for example. So the only thing I struggle with is core reluct.

And all that is, is that some days I just can't be asked to do it. Right. So that's the only thing that I have to figure out is how do I limit call reluctance? Or if it does come up, how do I act and behave to, to get through it? Right. Cause I know a lot of salespeople struggle with it. Everyone struggles with it.

No matter how good you get it. It you're always gonna struggle with that pump.

[00:30:33] Darryl Praill: So let on recap one thing and then, then wanna explore one thing further. So I loved your metaphor by the gym, because what you're really doing is when you go to the gym and you get into that routine, you see the results.

You're, you're, you're establishing, you're starting, you're establishing. And then you're building. The right habits, which means until that point of going to the gym, you're living, you know, you're, you're, you're eating whatever you want to eat. You're not, not exercising. You're, you know, you're, you're, you're grooming.

If you're work from home, you're grooming efforts, maybe questionable, you know, you've got bad habits and as much as that can be fun and comfortable and, and just, you know familiar. You get the results that bad habits spring, but when you are intentional about your habits, exactly, as column said, you get excited by the outcomes of that.

But so that's, you know, good habits versus bad habits folks, right? So you want to build winning habits as you take away from this one. And it's gonna be hard at first, but I wanna go back, talk about call reluctance. And this comes back to. Now I see a lot of reps who are really hard on themselves. If they have this call reluctance or they get into a bad stretch, because, you know, we talked about, you know, maybe, maybe it 10, 20% connection rate.

But what if you get into a bad stretch where you don't talk to somebody for three days straight and it happens, you know, it's just the luck of the draw. Sometimes our reps who hurt themselves, are they undermining their own success because of that. If, so how do I recognize it and how do I overcome it?

[00:32:05] Callum Beecroft: Yeah, really good question. So yeah, reps are really hard on themselves. I saw a LinkedIn post earlier about someone literally just posted, saying they need some help. They need someone to kind of raise their moods and give them a virtual hug and all of this, because for the exact reason they've been struggling to get.

Or set meetings. Right. So there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, the first thing is you gotta focus on what you can control. So if no one's picking up the phone, like I I'll have it. If it's like in the UK we had the Queens Jubilee, right? So during that week, I think there was two bank holidays, public holidays on the first day and the Friday.

But a lot of people took Monday, Tuesday. We. And I was still calling Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and it was a nightmare. There was no one working. If someone did answer, they didn't wanna have a conversation cause they're on holiday. But I can't control that. Right. So you've gotta focus on what you can control and all that is, is picking up the phone, trying to have those conversations.

But if it's not possible then, but you've tried, what more can you do? Right. The other thing that I was gonna say was that. We didn't really touch on it, but not being attached to the outcome of the call.

[00:33:16] Darryl Praill: Oh, love that

[00:33:17] Callum Beecroft: this one gets talked about a lot on LinkedIn. But for good reason, it's probably one of the best bit bits of advice that you can have as a, as a sales rep or an SDR or whatever.

Right. So when I'm making a cold call, I don't care about the outcome. I don't care if someone hangs up on me, I don't care if they swear at me, curse, whatever. I don't really care if I make a mistake either depending on the mistake. Or if that con or if that the prospect doesn't have problems that they, that I can fix.

Right. All of these things are outside of my control, apart from the mistake one. But yeah, I don't wanna focus on them. I just wanna focus on my process and. that is literally my mindset when I'm doing this is my job. Or what I'm trying to do is just execute my process as best as possible. And if I do that, and if I believe in the process, which I do, the outcomes will take care of themselves, right?

The people that I'm meant to meet with I'll meet with them. Those that I'm not gonna meet with we won't and the conversation ends there. Right. And that's my mindset. In essence mastery, right? I just wanna master this process. So anything outside of that I don't really care about. And obviously going back to the math of sale and all these things that's just helps me kind of deliver it day in, day out.

And I think that's really important because when, like you said, you go a dry patch and you don't get the, the connects or you, the prospects you speak to, they don't result in the meetings. It's really. Easy to beat yourself up over it and blame yourself, but all you can focus on is have I done and executed my process?

Well, enough, everything after that will just take care of itself. Right. And like I said, on the mistakes from like, I still make mistakes all the time, less than I used to, but as long as I learn something from that mistake, I don't really care. And what I'll do is I'll go back and I'll listen back to that.

And I'll try and figure out what it is that I did wrong. And I'll make a note of it. I'll plan it out if I need to do anything different and then I'll go and practice it. So that the next time it comes up, I don't make that same mistake again. And as a sales rep, if you do that and EV at the end of the day, ask yourself, did I hit my targets and my goals that I set myself, if I did brilliant.

And am I better at cold calling than I was yesterday? What did I learn? I I journal, right? So at the end of every calling session or every day, I will make a note of what my target was and whether I delivered it and if I missed it, why? So I've got a note might have been out of my control, right? And then I'll write three things, three things that I did well, and three things that I need to improve.

And I'll do that every single day. And it just reaffirms like that progress, right? This is my focus is just on this process. And by writing down the positive things, it reaffirms what I'm doing well. And if I can tie it back to the things that I needed to improve on yesterday, then I get an instant kind of affirmation that I'm heading in the right direction.

And it's just not a feeling, right. Because when things aren't going. There's not much of a positive feeling there for you to say I'm improving, but there may be little things in your process that you are still improving on where even though you don't get the results, right? So these are all the things that I do to just mentally help myself get through what is a difficult job and just make sure that I'm always on the right track.

[00:36:46] Darryl Praill: Wow. So haven't given this plug in a long time. But for those who are long time fans of the show, you've heard me say this more than one occasion, but it seems relevant right now. Callum talked about. Not being invested in the outcome. And he talked about just, you know, having a plan and working it. He talked about, you know, preparations, what process he talked about so much here. There's a book. It's a long standing. It's been out there for several years now, which written by Andrea waltz and Richard Fenton.

It's called go for no, I'm looking at it right now on Amazon. It's 12 bucks and the paperback. 12 bucks. S D you can buy it in Canada. You can buy it in UK. You can buy it everywhere, but it's 12 bucks and it talks, it gives you that process. It gives you that mindset. It's an easy, easy read. So if you, if you're a person, you listen to these podcasts and you go, yeah.

And when the episode's over, you're not sure what to do next. You heard 'em all you heard a Callum say, this is what I do. Well, you can listen to it again. That's the beauty of a podcast. Or go get go for now. It's got handbooks and playbooks and everything else to go with it. So another, depending on what works for you, whatever works for you.

The important part here is we recap what Callum talked. You're perfectly normal, but you gotta set goals. You gotta have targets, right? You gotta focus on the process. You gotta use the framework. You gotta prepare. That means asking lots of questions, understanding who your buyer is, asking, understanding why they would care, how you differ all the usual stuff.

Right? You gotta track yourself. Right? You have to break those poor habits and be very intentional about establishing good habits. Recognize you're gonna have good. And bad days, but when you have those bad days, don't be too hard on yourself. One of the things Kam does is he journals and he reaffirms three things.

He did well. And then he's honest with himself and says, here's three things that I need to improve on. And he gives himself permission to be honest. Without beating himself up. That's just, and another area to focus on no different than when going back to the gym, you say, okay, I didn't do a great job on, on, on my upper body today.

And next time I gotta, I gotta already push myself and maybe add, you know, five more pounds or, you know, do 10 more reps who the hell knows, but you gotta push yourself. All of this, if you do it makes cold calling hesitancy call reluctancy. Fade will whatever disappear, probably not, but I'll get a hell a lot better.

And trust me when you get the big fat commission checks that come because you do the kick ass job at your phoning call reluctancy, remarkably fades away and is much less of an issue. It could be worse. You could be Callum, Callum lives and dies by taking on new clients all the time. He doesn't have a guaranteed paycheck.

This is why he's motivated. So let me ask you this. What's your motivation to get better. what's your motivation to get better. All right. And we're gonna leave it there. We're not gonna answer it. I'm gonna tell you right now, you gotta follow Callum. He's got some great stuff. I was looking at some of his posts where we came online.

I was waiting for him to join me in the green room and I was loving his stuff. So if I liked it, you're gonna absolutely adore him. That is Callum Beecroft the phonejacker. And I will say. It's the biggest compliment and the, and similarly the biggest insult I can possibly give a poor man. Callum, you sound like a much more talented, yet nicer Benjamin than he.

I want you to know that I really enjoyed our conversation today. So with that folks, that's Callum. I'm Darryl. That's another episode in the can. Did you like it? Make sure to go and like us, give us a review, but more importantly, share the show with all your friends. It's the inside inside sales show.

We'll talk to you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.

This episode was digitally transcribed.