Introvert Meets Telephone

Sharon Flank, CEO of InfraTrac, learned that founders are the best salespeople and motivated herself to pick up the phone and start selling.

Introvert makes cold call. Introvert crawls under desk to recover. That’s me, or at least it was. If it sounds like you too, you know you’re going to have to do something to harness the passion and enthusiasm you have for your startup, because no one is going to know that unless you talk to them.

Like lots of technical types, I am happier in small groups, happier when other people make the introductions. But that isn’t how selling works, and when I first started, my selling didn’t. Work, that is. If you only make ten calls a week, it takes a long time to find the people who are going to help you refine and target your product, much less buy it.

So here’s what worked for me: chocolate. The first call is the hardest, somehow, and so that’s the one that has the reward program. No calls, no chocolate.

I do use other sales tools, of course, and the tracking and reminder features in Salesforce are critical to ensuring that the calls I’m making align with our goals. When I first founded InfraTrac, we tracked calls with spreadsheets, but it is all too easy to look at a spreadsheet without taking action. I need those reminders to pop up and provide a nudge. When I touch a contact, now I put in a task and reminder for what comes next and when.

Even people who like your product are not necessarily going to follow through and take the initiative to get back to you, but they will respond to a follow-up call, and calls really do seem to work better than email. Sometimes, though, it’s hard to get going and make those calls. I mean, in your personal life, if you called somebody five times and they didn’t call you back, you’d stop, right? Or you’d be a stalker. Stalking’s the story here, though, introvert or not. The first prospect that thanked me for my persistence after I finally connected on the tenth try? An inspiration for months, which got me a lot of days of chocolate.

Of course you have to add value, not be a nag. What you do anyway to maintain your domain expertise works here too: you read about technical advances, mergers and acquisitions, and market news, whether you are relying on Twitter or Google alerts or industry publications. All of that information helps you provide value when you follow up: find industry news that is relevant to them, share your latest breakthroughs, offer something they can use in an upcoming presentation.

Call, though, got to call. And for that, nothing has worked like the chocolate.

Dr. Sharon Flank is founder and CEO of InfraTrac, a product verification company. She has managed scientists, academics and software engineers. She helped create companies later sold to AOL and Kodak. Sharon is a frequent speaker on anti-counterfeiting and medication safety. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard and her A.B. from Cornell.