Momentum Podcast: 495

Cancel Cold Calls Fast

by Alex Charfen

Episode Description

Entrepreneurial anxiety is real. The faster we come to terms with it, the faster we can do something about it. So where does entrepreneurial anxiety come from? It comes from people like you and I wanting to be in momentum, make progress, get things done, and not being able to. If we lean in and embrace the anxiety, it will help us move forward.

I experienced entrepreneurial anxiety last week while I was out with a nasty sinus infection. Thankfully I had a plan and team in place that allowed our business to still make massive progress in my absence. If you are experiencing entrepreneurial anxiety, you need to have a plan. Not only is it important to have a plan in place, but you also need to make sure every member of your team understands it. That way if you have to take a few days off, your team can still move the business forward. You also need to recognize and eliminate where you are uncomfortable. Don’t deny the anxiety. It only makes it worse. 

If you build the right team, have a plan, recognize where you are uncomfortable, and eliminate what’s holding you back, you will reduce anxiety.

Full Audio Transcript

The more you believe in your plan, the more you believe in where you are going, the more you will be offended by interruptions. I know I am. That's why I want to record this podcast to help you understand why you should cancel cold calls fast. If someone reaches out to you, I want to give you license permission and motivation to get off the phone immediately.

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will.

We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be.

There are some lessons it's taken me forever to learn in my career and one that may be obvious to some, and I know some people will listen to this podcast and go, holy cow, I can't believe it took him so long to learn this, but for the first several years of my career and even a little bit more than that, when I would get a cold call from a sales person, I often stayed on the phone, listened and I actually acted curious to see if that person could help us.

Now, here's how crazy that behavior was like now with perspective, I know just how absolutely nuts that was because here's what you are counting on when you get onto a cold call with somebody and so when someone calls you out of the blue, you are counting on them having the exact solution you need right now and they just happen to be calling you and that it's more important that what you're already doing. See, the only people who take cold calls are the ones without a plan. When I used to work in corporations as a consultant, I used to watch us all the time. Somebody would be sitting in their cubicle or even in their office, pick up a phone call and you could tell it was from someone they didn't know. You could tell it was someone who was pitching them on something and I can't tell you how many times I've watched somebody to take 20, 30, 40 minutes an hour on a cold call that wasn't scheduled, wasn't part of what they were doing and came out of the blue.

That is absolutely crazy because here's what we have to understand when we allow that type of an interruption in our lives. What we are proactively saying is that this chance in one in hundreds chance that the person on the phone has what we need at the time we need it right now. Just happens to be calling out of some like universal luck that has struck down and put them in our path that, that is what's happening instead of just jumping off of the call as fast as you possibly can. See, hears what you learn as an entrepreneur over time is that any interruption is destructive. Any interruption takes you out of the game. Any interruption can take you out of flow and if you know where you're going, if you know what you're doing, if you have a plan in place, if you're making things happen, how could you ever let an interruption take you out of what you're doing, take you out of flow because here's what we are actually telling ourselves.

When we allow someone else to interrupt our time to take our time. We're telling ourselves our time is not valuable. And when I watched people do this in corporations, I would sit there, and I would think to myself, they don't value their time. They don't value their focus. They don't really know what they're doing. They're just letting someone steal their most valuable asset right now. And here's the issue with people like us. If you're sitting there thinking, well, there was that one time that I answered a cold call, and I bought this thing, or I did this other thing, right? I had an opportunity I wouldn't have had otherwise. Well, I want you to know something. You are an internal optimist. It's part of being an entrepreneur. We look for the good in every situation. So when I say get off of cold calls, immediately our brains automatically going to say, Whoa, is there ever a time that it was good?

Well, here's the reality. If you ever had a time where you've gone on a cold call, and it worked out, you got lucky. You want to spend the rest of your time letting other people guide your focus, hoping to get lucky, hoping that it's just by chance exactly what you need. I know you don't, so here's why this is so important. Number one, a cold call is someone else controlling your time. Time is your most valuable asset. If you need something, the chances that somebody's going to call you and have it for you, right there is one in hundreds or thousands or millions and you are allowing somebody to rob you of your time. This is like getting up first thing in the morning and reading email. This is like having someone else manage you. None of us would hire a manager. Don't let some sales guy who's cold calling call you and manage your time.

In fact, I get so offended by cold calls. My company never will never sell anything that requires a gold call. We have 100% warm traffic. People reaching out to talk to us. Why? Because they know who we are. They know they need our solution. I don't want to go through all of the barriers are to getting on a cold conversation. It's the worst. Second. This is why this is important. You have to guard your focus as if your life depends on it because it does. There's no argument you can make here. Your focus creates outcomes. Your outcomes create your life, your life. That's how you create the legacy that you want to leave. That's how you create the success you want. That's how you create what you want. If you're not in the place you want in your life, it's because your focus has been in the wrong place.

So guard your focus like your life depends on it because it does. Then why else is this important? I've already said it a couple of times, but there is a near 0% chance that a cold call coming into your day is more important than what you're doing as long as you have a clear plan. So here's how you walk yourself out of this so that you never even have the possibility of getting on a cold call because this is what's crazy. I've seen entrepreneurs who are offended by red lights because they cause constraint in their day, but will take a cold call and engage in a conversation. Don't ever do it again. Number one, here's how you avoid this type of distraction. Have a plan, have a plan. Distractions are near impossible when you have a clear outcome. If you're aiming at something you're achieving, you're moving forward.

You have perspective? You know what's happening and someone calls you with a cold call. You're not going to give him the time of day. Have a plan. Know that you're making progress, and you will naturally avoid things like cold calls. Second, have a clear purchasing process in your business. Don't ever buy anything because somebody called you. There's is a podcast I recorded called Create a Purchasing Process, and it goes through how in our company, anyone in my entire company can become a purchasing agent by using our purchasing process. We go through exactly what we need. We find the companies that provided, we get three quotes. We drive those quotes to the best deal we can possibly get. We compare all three. We choose one, have a clear purchasing process. That will crush a cold call deal any day of the week.

We get the best deals out there. In fact, we still have a credit card processing deal no one can match. We have all hosting deals no one can match because we've driven them to the point through a purchasing process, not because somebody reached out and talked to us. Then the last thing you need to know, and this one's big, talk to your team about avoiding phone calls. I can remember a few years ago, the person who was running all my systems in IT came into my office and started pitching me on this platform that was like a platform for our team, and it was going to be used internally, and it's where you put all kinds of types of training. And it was also an HR platform and then some other things that it did. I think he gave benefits and something else.

I remember sitting there and listening to him for like 20 minutes, and then finally I said, "Hey, I just need to ask you, why are we talking about this right now? It's not on our plan. It's not on a weekly. I thought like there was a sense of urgency here, so I've like listened for 20 minutes, but I have no clue why we're talking about this." And then I got the answer. He said, "Well I got a call from this guy, and I got on a call with him. He explained to me this platform, it looked like a really good deal, and he gave me this special deal that we can only get for the next 48 hours. So I wanted to make sure I talked to you about it because if it's something we want to do, we should move now."

I remember thinking, are you kidding me? Did I just spend 20 minutes of my life on a bi curious cold call. Somebody else got cold call, and it's somehow stole my time. I was so frustrated, and I didn't get angry in the moment. I did say like, 'Are you serious we're really talking about a cold call? And he said, "But it looks like a good platform and nice. And I said, I reminded him, we had a purchasing process. I reminded him this was nowhere on our annual plan, our 90 day plan, our 30 day plan, our weekly commitments. I couldn't, it didn't say we needed a new HR platform or platform for for our team. And so there was no reason I should be talking about it. I explained that to him, and then I talked to him about avoiding all cold calls in the future.

I shared with him what I shared with you today that cold calls is the only people who stay on cold calls who react to a cold call are those who don't know where they're going. I had to remind him, we had a clear plan. Don't let somebody else steal your focus. Steal your time. Heck, don't let somebody else steal my focus in time. So if you're going to avoid cold calls, make sure you let your team know they should avoid cold calls too. Let everyone in your organization know. Because here's what happens as you grow, it's already happening to us. If people can't get through to me, they go find Haley or they go find Dustin or they go find Deanna or Greg or someone else in the company or Cadey and they start pitching them. So teach your entire team, that cold calls are not part of your company's culture.

Cold calls are not how you do business. You do not allow cold calls to come into the company. And when somebody does, they should all be offended that someone is trying to steal our time, our energy, our company's progress, and get off of the call. So if you avoid phone calls or cold... well I try to avoid phone calls. But if you avoid cold calls from now on, here's what'll happen. You're going to have a lot less distraction in your life. You'll get more time back, and you're going to have a higher level of focus. But here's what happens when you automatically instinctively get off the cold call every time you habitually train your mind that your time is more important. You habitually train yourself to shut other people down from robbing your focus. You habitually train yourself to guard your focus, like your life depends on it and every time you do it, you should think to yourself, I'm building that wall, that momentum bubble around me so people can't get in, and I can make my life happen.

I can go make the impact, the outcomes that I want, grow a business, make the revenue I want and make the dent in the universe I've always been meant to. Cold calls will take you out of the game. Don't let them. There's absolutely no reason for it. If you are ready to grow your business, and you're ready to grow it fast, reach out to us. Go to billionairecode.com and fill out a few questions from my team and we will... and you can set up a call with my team where you can discuss the programs that we have and how we're helping companies around the world grow and scale fast.

If you're at the point where you have an opportunity that you know could be bigger, and you could be doing more, you know that if you had the right team around you, the right infrastructure around you, the right support and help you could be making a bigger impact, making more revenue, helping more people. If you're in that place, reach out now, go to billionairecode.com, answer a few questions from my team and jump on a call with us, so we can share with you how we're helping entrepreneurs scale and grow fast, grow teams, empires and make a massive difference in the world. Billionairecode.com.

Thank You For Listening!

I am truly grateful that you have chosen to spend your time listening to me and my podcast.

Please feel free to reach out if you have a question or feedback via our Contact Us page.

Please leave me a review on iTunes and share my podcast with your friends and family.

With gratitude,

Alex

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