Hey! Tasha here with Emerge Sales Training and we give hope to network marketers that want to uplevel their sales and their sales leadership skills. So we have courses that range anywhere from $200 to almost $1000. You can check them out EmergeSalesTraining.com/courses.
Before I get into the content for today, which is How to Motivate Yourself to Actually Make Calls, you’re probably wondering what the heck the rest of my shirt says because this is what always happens when I wear this shirt. It says “Dude be Nice”, and I wear it in honor our leadership training a lot of times.
So, now that that is out of the way, let me go ahead and give you a really really cool tip on how to motivate yourself to make calls. So this is a question that comes up a lot in our different coaching programs and Facebook groups…things like…“I want to make the calls,” or, “I want to do the planning, and I just can’t” and so on.
So what’s going on here?
I was recently reading a book called Pre-Suasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini, and it was pretty cool.
The main premise of the book is that whatever we focus our attention on right before we make a decision significantly impacts our decision, and we can “pre-swayed” others by focusing their attention on something, or, I think, we can even pre-swayed ourselves. And so that’s what I’m here to talk about.
So when we sit down to make calls, what is that like?
It’s like, “Ugh, I got to make calls, but I don’t want to do that.” And then maybe you might look around your desk, or your couch, and you see your kids, and your family, and the TV, and all that stuff, and, of course, you’re not motivated to make calls.
So what can you do?
So there’s a really interesting observation that Dr. Cialdini made: When he was writing his first book, Influence of Science and Practice, he would sometimes go to the University and write. He would write, and he would talk to his colleagues, and be in those buildings at his office there at the University…and because of that, he would write very academically.
When he was at home, his window that was in front of the area where his office was (where he would write), he could see lots of people walking back and forth and that ended up changing his writing.
When he went to go put the book together, it was all over the place, because the writing style was different than when he could actually see the people that he was writing to…because he was trying to write toward laypeople, non-academics.
So what does that have to do with you making calls?
There’s another study that they did where they were following these HR consultant-type people, and these people were supposed to go into companies and create incentive programs for their people.
Well, there are a few times that the incentive programs are significantly better and more effective than others. And what they found is that when this group of people had clear-sight to the employees that worked there, their performance improved because they were focusing on the people, not the project.
And that helped them to really keep the people in mind and increase their effectiveness.
This is why this is important for making calls: most people, I think, have pictures of their kids at their desk, right? Or, for example, I have all these like things that they’ve made, pictures of your family, stuff like that.
Well, then what we’re focusing on right before we’re going to make our calls are those things. So it makes sense that our brain wants to go and focus on those things.
What if instead we did the same thing to our workspace that these people ended up doing when they were designing incentive programs?
What they did was they studied the effects of going into a closed-door room where they couldn’t see anyone and actually put up pictures of people that they would be working with, and it increased their effectiveness, productivity, and overall results.
I just thought that was so cool.
Another quick example is telemarketers. If the telemarketer has all those success posters all over, it increases the number of calls they make because it gets them to focus on things like success.
Like one I have here from my friend who gave it to me almost 20 years ago. It says, “Belief: Always use the word impossible with the greatest caution.” So if I put that in my line of sight, that is going to change the way I approach work.
So, what is my tip?
My tip is instead of keeping your focal point on your desk, or wherever it is you’re making calls (hopefully you have just small desk setup, even if it’s in the corner of your home), instead of making that like a family collage…grab a few cards from Successories and frame them.
Print out some pictures of your previous customers, if you need to make customer calls.
If you need to make calls to your team, or if you’re creating something for your team, grab some pictures for them.
You could also take pictures of potential people that you’d love to reach out to.
So let’s say you have a bunch of people that you would love to approach to join your team or buy your products, and you know them well. What if you print out a bunch pictures, and put them all over your workspace? You would be more motivated to call them because they would be more human.
For my own example, when I’m in the space where I’m feeling a lack of inspiration for creating content, I could put this picture I took of a funny puppet show I did with one of my private masterminds, and that would help me to focus…not on creating content, not on the white screen in front of me, but on these people who are bringing their teams to me to help deliver.
And I will write with these people in mind.
So, here’s my challenge to you: Adjust your workspace.
Find pictures of the people that you care about that you want to help, that you want to serve, and put those in your workspace to remember why is it that you are actually calling.
Alright, I hope that this tip was super helpful for you. We would love to see you in one of our courses you can check them out EmergeSalesTraining.com/courses.
Have a great day!