(For over 15 years Harding & Company has helped hundreds of professionals make the transition from doing and managing client worked selling it.  Among our duties is helping the people we work with recognize it when they are avoiding the hard work on developing relationships and generating leads.  This is the third of a series of posts on the most popular avoidance tactics.)

Many people feel awkward about calling former clients and other business contacts.  They imagine getting a negative response, and this imaginary image becomes so strong that they accept it as if we were real.  These people say things, like “ he’ll think I am just calling to sell them something” or “ she’ll be annoyed with me.”  These people fall into the trap of believing that they can read other people’s minds.

If you find that you say such things to yourself and that it deters you are making calls, remember the following:

1. People generally accept without question your stated reason for calling them.  Even if they suspect that you may be calling to sell them something in your first call, they will quickly learn that that is not your primary motivation, if you focus on providing value to them in each conversation.  This value can include recognizing them as people and friends, providing some information that might help them, offering an introduction, and the like.  The more you call people and provide such help, the less they are likely to ascribe to you a mercenary motivation.
2. Even if they do suspect that a hope for new business is one motivation for your call, few will be offended.  After all, most are in business, themselves, and in business everyone must live by selling something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 7th, 2009 at 5:16 AM and is filed under Business Development, Leads, Phone Calls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.