Blowing your chances, one call at a time
Telephone calls are a fact of life for the busy entrepreneur. The stereotype has the small businessman glued to his iPhone, either texting or taking a call every couple of minutes, or whipping it out and speed-dialing in an instant when something comes up. You call to sell, call to hire, call to make deals, call to send or receive vital information. Many entrepreneurs live and die by the phone… which makes phone conversations a must have skill for most.
David Siteman Garland has an amusing story (or maybe it's just cringe-inducing) of one phone call that certainly didn't have quite the results the businessman probably had in mind.
If there is a key to avoiding this sort of cold-sell hell, I think it is probably empathy. The gentleman making the call obviously was trying to fake it, and that just doesn't work. You really, genuinely have to understand and care about the concerns of the person on the other end of the call. If you're not giving them something to address all that, if the call is entire about what can happen for you, then no matter how much language you throw in to make it seem mutually beneficial, the person on the other end of the line is probably going to sense it.