I Guess Ben Hawes Makes Sales Calls Now…

I feel like I can’t continue my day until I document the ridiculous way I felt today when I was making my first sales calls ever. A couple of weeks ago, my boss from my internship got me a cell phone so that I could start making calls to potential customers. Making calls to potential customers is something I’d define as a gigantic fear of mine.

Now, I do have some pretty important experience with sales calls. I watch The Office, and I watched that one episode of Boy Meets World where Cory has to sell magazines over the phone and he can’t so Topanga does it and rocks. I had to mix the best qualities of Jim Halpert and Topanga Lawrence into the perfect sales person, because that person would be unstoppable.

Knowing that I needed to be perfect, I began my research. I googled “how to make a sales call” and I fell into a well of much needed information on how to be a good sales person.

The thing that’s amazing about my internship is that there’s no real program. There’s nothing that has been put into place to teach me, so when by boss says things like “make sales calls,” I end up doing hours of research that help to make me a better future employee of some marketing or sales company.

Have you ever called someone you don’t know and tried to sell them something? Well everyone I have talked to says they hate talking on the phone and that making sales calls would be their worst fear. SAME.

However, It’s something that I would LOVE to be amazing at, and I really want to get to be really great at it!

I feel like I did so much preparation for these calls today. I read a bunch of articles and decided to write out a script. I honestly spent like an hour writing this script, and another literal hour practicing it. It is FOR SURE not perfect, but I saved it and I’m going to ask my boss about it on monday.

I had 11 calls to make. These are people that have cool shops on Etsy.com, and could use Volumebee.com to host a sale on one of their products. I just wanted to get my feet wet today and start with the 11.

I was at home, by the way, and I was SO nervous to make the calls. Once I “decided” to start calling, It took 20 minutes to even dial the number.

They say that the reason people fail at sales calls is a lack of confidence, so I was NOT off to a good start! Usually, confidence is a huge strength of mine. Not today.

One video said that people lose sales calls because you are calling people, and when the people don’t want what you are selling, you get discouraged. I definitely didn’t feel like I was going to be hurt if they said no, so It started to make more sense for me to be confident.

My Palms were sweating! My actual palms were sweating. I started pacing around, I grabbed a diet coke, I took everything out of my pockets, I turned on a fan, and I even changed my pants because I wasn’t comfortable enough to make these dumb calls! Like any of that could help at all!

It honestly got to the point where I realized that nothing could be worse than being this nervous, so I might as well just get the calls over with!

Meanwhile, I had the American National Anthem stuck in my head, so I kept belting “O’er the rampaaarts we waaaaaatched!!!”

Nobody was home. I mean, I truly hope nobody was home.

Finally I was ready. I picked up the phone, dialed the first number, walked around for ten minutes, and pressed call.

Ring……Ring……Ring……. NO ANSWER!

What a build up for nothing! So I called the next number. No Answer. Next number. No Answer.

I forgot that other people hate the phone too!

Out of 11 calls, I got one person to answer. I started my script and I noticed that I was actually pretty confident and nice and enthusiastic and fun. Much to my surprise. The woman who answered asked me to just email the information to her, which is totally more my speed!

A valuable lesson was learned. Kind of. I know that the only way to get good at doing sales calls is to do sales calls. It’s something I actually want to get good at, so I just have to keep it going!

If anyone has any phone calling ideas, sales ideas, or being nervous advice let me know by commenting!