When Carole came into my office the other day, she was at that point in the day we all face where we really don't want to spend another minute on the phone.

"There has to be another way to do this" came a plaintiff cry for help." Carole is relatively new to the selling game, but, as one who has hired a lot of sales people in my 23 years in business, I can tell you that she has great potential because she is a good learner and never gives up.

"I know I have to go on," she said. "I know you have to endure so many no's in order to get so many 'yesses'... law of averages, so many calls, so many no's, so many sales... it's all in the numbers..." her stream of consciousness dialogue dragged on in an attempt to create a self hypnotic suggestion for a fresh breath of psychic energy.

My initial attempt at encouragement was to get her to stop thinking about all of those no's. It's NOT all in the numbers. I have never felt that way about selling and I do not believe that if you count up all of the people who turn you down you will end up with a lot of money.

I think this departure from popular sales manager wisdom got Carole's attention and I could see the glaze across her eyes from the morning's boring phone work start to clear away. We talked about getting into the right mind-set. Mind-set discussions are nothing new, I suppose, except for what that mind-set actually is.

You see, I told her, If you consciously keep track of everybody who turns you down, or beats you up (verbally, of course), or wears you out with endless objections that get you and them no place, you MUST burn out before you finish calling every name on your prospect list. Why? Because you're mind is keeping negative score. Keeping tight call/appointment ratios may sound like good sales management, but it can often divert your time and energy from your one true telephone prospecting task: getting the appointment, or the order, or whatever your task is.

On the other hand, let's consider this prospecting alternative. What if I had a large fishbowl full of jelly beans, all bright different colors, some red, some orange, some white, some black, and mixed in with them was a $50,000 diamond, jelly bean size. Now I will allow you to roll up one sleeve and thrust that hand down into the jelly beans until either you find that diamond or you get too tired to continue. You can keep whatever you decide to take, but you may not take more than one item out of the fishbowl, be it diamond or jelly bean. You may inspect the contents of your hand while it's still in the fishbowl as often as you wish.

What would you do? Would you grab a hand full of objects, open your hand face up to inspect your booty? Yes, you would. If there was no diamond in your hand, would you discard the paltry jelly beans the way a gold prospector chucks aside a pan of soil and rocks and grab another handful in your quest for fortune? Yes. Would you do this over and over again until you found the $50,000 gem? Yes. Of course you would.

But, after you had the gem in your hand and was holding it up to the light to admire it, if I then asked you how many times you actually turned up a handful of mere jelly beans, would you have any idea as to what to answer? Naaah. Who cares. You could have turned up a handful of jelly beans once, or five times, or a thousand times, but you would never have counted how many times.

Why? Because the number of attempts at that diamond has as little value to you as knowing the number of steps you take when you wheel a shopping cart through the supermarket, or the number of times you turn the steering wheel to the left and right in a day's driving. You push the cart until you have what you need and have reached the check out register. You turn the wheel until you get to your destination. You dig for jelly beans until you have a diamond.

In the same way, you keep on phoning until you have the number of sales appointments you need to sell enough to buy the car to get you to the supermarket. The actual number of attempts is irrelevant.

What is relevant is this:

1. You must know there is a reward worth the effort.

2. You must know that the reward is attainable, that it is there and will be won.

So why are we told all of this junk about counting the no's. Beats me, but I stopped doing that years ago. Instead, I do this:

1: I try to find prospect lists that are worthy of my efforts. I don't just stick my hand into a fishbowl because it has jelly beans in it. I want to know that there is at least a diamond or two in there, too.

2. I make sure that the list is not only of the right kind of prospect for what I sell, but that the people on that list will actually talk to me. With the jelly beans, if the fishbowl is too large for my hand to reach the bottom, I'll fail to pull up that diamond even if I scoop until the next millennium.

Working the right list and working the right contacts on that list is more than vital. It makes ME vital. It lets me know that I am in my market, so I can't make feeble excuses about how many no's I should expect. I just plunge in and ask for the sale every time.

No, my closing rate is not 100%. Yes, I do get turned down, but I'll bet I get more excitement out of my work knowing that there is at least one guaranteed, high quality, expensive, take to the bank as collateral, diamond in every single one of my lists of jelly bean prospects.

The next time you see a prospect list and a telephone, think of that fishbowl full of jelly beans... the one with that big diamond payoff just waiting for as long as it takes you to find it.

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(Revised and copyright 2004, Stan Rosenzweig, President Office Technology Consulting Inc. Copying and distribution by permission only.)

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Stan Rosenzweig
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Stamford, CT 06901
203-323-6070, ext. 305