Category Archives: Career

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Cold Call Catastrophes and Catalysts

As the economy comes under increasing pressure, I find myself wading through an email inbox increasingly filled with clutter. I am being too polite. It is filled with garbage. Sadly, much of that garbage comes from sales folk who think they are reaching out to me to generate much-needed business for their companies.

Cold-calling is part of a salesperson’s job, I know that, and it is hard. If you don’t learn to do it well, you won’t be in sales long, or you will be doing it for the rest of your life on increasingly less lucrative accounts with thinner commissions than you are currently receiving. If you are not hearing back from me and the many others you are bombarding with modestly tailored spam, I am sure I don’t have to remind you that you are not succeeding.

While overcoming objections is a pillar of sales, you aren’t doing that if I delete your pitch on sight. Given the lack of good training you might be getting, allow me to suggest a few things you might be doing wrong. At the risk of inviting further assault, I will then suggest some things you might want to consider doing instead. If you are a manager overseeing a platoon of cold-callers, this might be an excellent time to audit your strategies, tactics, directions, and results to help those under your wing succeed rather than struggle.

“Can I send you a gift card for your time?”

No, you can’t. I don’t trade my time for $10 per half-hour. I also don’t want a free Yeti mug. I am not taking a meeting as a thank-you for something I can buy on my own. Anyone who takes this paltry bait is either violating their company’s conflicts policy or stringing you along without decision-making authority. Don’t offer to have coffee, lunch, designer cookies, or anything else sent to my office as an introduction. We don’t know each other. This is not going to make us friends. It’s insulting and you must stop now. This is not the same as me agreeing to have lunch or dinner with you in person because you have caught my interest. It’s cheap, it’s icky, and it compromises both our integrity.

“Can we jump on the phone for a few minutes?”

No, we can’t. I don’t jump on calls. I choose them wisely. Remember the obvious: I don’t know you and you don’t know me. You’re selling to me. It’s not my job to pick a time from your calendar to hear a sales pitch you initiated. You are being presumptuous and overreaching if you think I am going to drop what I am doing to jump at your opportunity. Don’t make yourself look silly when you are introducing yourself.

“Are you the right person to consider a new service?”

Seriously, you can’t be bothered to do your homework and know the answer to this before you send your inquiry? Why do you think I pick the VOIP system here? Or the cleaning service? Or the door alarm? If you’re wrong soliciting me, do you think I’m going to tell you whom you should pitch when I don’t know you? If we’re considering a new voicemail platform, someone is already working on that and you’re too late.

“Did I drop below the top of your email list?”

Yes, each of the last three times you emailed me and I didn’t respond. Moving your fourth inquiry back to the top of my email inbox at best is going to remind me of the last three I ignored in my backlog or deleted. What’s that old saying about the definition of insanity?

Okay, enough timesink, I’m sure there are dozens (hundreds) more examples of these non-icebreakers. Your time is valuable, same as mine, and neither of us can afford to be wasting it. Your bosses may tell you they want to know how many cold calls you made yesterday (almost no one calls anymore so most of this is email), but what they want are prospects — warm leads they believe you can convert to business. Here are a few avenues that might get you an email in return, the start of a conversation, which is the best you can hope to achieve on a first solicitation.

Get a proper introduction.

Want to meet me? Find someone who knows both of us and get that person to facilitate an introduction. I just heard your head explore: “That’s so hard,” you bellowed. “It could take weeks, and then why would anyone volunteer to bother you about an intrusive sales call?” Yes, exactly. It’s going to be a rare occurrence, but if you know someone I know and they think meeting you could potentially help me, they will reach out on your behalf. This is the drumbeat of effective networking. When it’s mutually beneficial, all boats float. A warm introduction beats a cold introduction every day of the week. It is worth all your time to secure one.

Send me something I don’t know.

I may not want your canned demo, but if you take the time to prepare a custom report that clearly demonstrates how your product or service solves a problem I have, I might flip past slide one. It all depends on how hard you’ve worked to make your case, how much useful data you can amass that catches my attention, and how relevant your argument proves to be from the first sentence to the last. “I can’t possibly do that for every cold call,” you groan. I agree, you don’t have to do it for every unrequested approach, just the one you want me to acknowledge.

Establish a relationship based on shared interests.

There’s a lot you can learn about people you want to meet by doing research — the organizations where they belong, the charities they support, the articles they’ve written or talks they’ve given, If you find a way to establish an authentic bond or point of connection, there is a chance you might open a dialogue that leads to a business opportunity. This is a much longer road and it will fail more than it will succeed, but it is much easier to pitch someone when they’ve already decided you are credible, rather than evaluating your personal credibility and your pitch in the same instant. Would you be surprised to hear that people like to do business with people they know or have already done business with in the past? Getting that history is hard, but once you have it, a lot more doors open.

What’s the real secret?

The real secret to building a successful sales pipeline hasn’t much changed in a hundred or more years: It all comes down to advance work. As much as 90% of your sales success is in preparation. Once you get in front of someone, which is the shortest time on time on the calendar, your presentation skills will stand or fall on your offstage readiness. Shortcuts seldom work. It’s your time out of sight that makes your time in sight resonate. Your time is an investment in your outcome, and the more you invest, the more likely you are to establish the basis of an opportunity.

Or you can offer to send me a gift card for a luscious fruit basket I won’t redeem and add that send to the tally you report to your boss. Your choice.

_______________

Photo: Pixabay

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Be In The Room

Over the past weeks, several major companies have announced various return-to-office policies. That means a requirement to be in an office some number of days each week. Thus far I have resisted sending a similar memo because I think for the most part this is best left to the judgment of department leaders who understand their goals, More than that, I am counting on the good judgment of individuals to make sense of advancing their career horizons.

Let me offer this one bit of advice: If you have the opportunity to be in the room and are not taking it, you might be doing yourself an enormous disservice. The time you spend at home may make your current life easier. I have significant doubt it will make your future more successful.

In my experience, there is no substitute for being in the room. It is where true bonds are created. It is where you can see in person how difficult challenges are met. It is where your gifts can be shared and recognized not just by your peers and boss, but by your boss’s boss, and anyone up the chain who might poke in their head and see you in action.

That’s not office politics. That’s reality.

Willingly giving up a chance to be in the room is a choice you make at your own risk, to the extent you have the choice. If you still have that choice, consider what you might be giving up in exchange for those nasty commute hours and a refrigerator full of your own preferred food.

Several decades ago, I was a recent college graduate desperate for an opportunity. I offer the word desperate quite deliberately. Despite a bachelor’s degree in the humanities from a known college, a string of paid jobs and internships, and a resume filled with extracurricular projects, I was just another unknown job applicant in a huge pool of recent college grads. The economy was in rough shape. It seemed no one who mattered even wanted to talk with me, let alone hire me.

All I wanted was to be in the room.

Like so many others, I ceaselessly kept at it and eventually got interviews. After many of those I got hired into a lousy job, then another lousy job, then several other lousy jobs, then finally a good job that I believe started my real career. At no time during that arc or any subsequent arc did the notion of willingly working remotely ever cross my mind, although one of those jobs happened to be such four out of five days each week because they had no desk for me. Any time I was able to be at work I considered it a catapulting privilege to be among accomplished, ambitious colleagues.

I never forgot what it was like being in a small apartment waiting for the phone to ring for an invitation to be in the room. I also can’t imagine doing what I do today without those many decades of watching other people perform their jobs across the spectrum from expertly to incompetently.

Every chance to be in the room for me has been a chance to learn. At the same time, it has been a chance to collaborate, creatively engage, and be a part of innovation.

Have I taken solo work home to review evenings and over the weekend regularly? You bet.

Do I believe there are times when telecommuting makes sense? Absolutely.

Do I see the internet as an unrivaled tool to share ideas globally among people who might never have the chance to gather under the same roof? Without question.

Would any of it convince me that forgoing an opportunity to be in the room for comfort, convenience, or an alleged increase in productivity was a reasonable trade? Not on your life.

Working alone may increase efficiency. I don’t see it increasing creativity.

Covid-19 response was an anomaly. Did it teach many of us a new set of behaviors, that we could accomplish things remotely if it was a necessity? It certainly did. Is the continuing right to work remotely an entitlement that is the result of that learning? Well, not exactly.

I suppose in an employment market where talent has unlimited options, the benefit of working remotely might be a trading card that management can offer to attract team members. Yet if management is only offering this benefit because it has no choice if positions are to be filled, how positive do you think management feels about that? Hiring managers want choices just like you want choices. When anything becomes a mandate, it often does so with a nagging amount of reservation.

One of the things I noticed when Covid first grounded us was how quickly and well our leadership team adapted to remote meetings. In many respects, I think it is the reason our company succeeded and curiously accelerated during Covid. Many colleagues at other companies weren’t as lucky. Some tragically saw their companies in demise, not only as a result of unprecedented business conditions but of the challenges in responding to those conditions with untested practices.

The more I thought about this, the more I was convinced that we succeeded because of the years we previously spent together in the room. Those many years of collaboration established a solid foundation for crisis management we could apply remotely. We were able to talk in shorthand because we had established that shorthand. We were able to use humor because we knew each other’s sensibilities and sensitivities. I couldn’t even imagine the idea of trying to onboard a VP into a remote setting, where I knew others were trying and failing at this.

Our team knew this management paradigm was intended to be temporary and that we would be back in person as soon as practicable. Personally, I couldn’t wait and was back in the office as soon as I could. We also didn’t overreact. We knew that five days a week in person for everyone no longer made sense because it had never made sense. It was obvious that forty or so required office hours was too broad a brush. We knew workplace equilibrium would work itself out, while we counted on individuals to make sense of their careers in tandem with company needs.

Moderation always seems like a better approach to consensus than absolutes. Individual decisions always seem preferable to sweeping mandates when inspiring people’s best work.

I had a sense that every individual would come to understand the value of being in the room. To be in the room is to absorb the skills you will call upon to address the next set of challenges you will face. To be in the room is a gift, perhaps not every day, but on the days that matter and will stay with you for a lifetime.

You may be arguing with me in your head. You may be telling yourself this is a new day, a different generation, a wiser and more inspired collective that embraces work-life balance and knows to mistrust corporations that don’t have their best interests at heart. You might be convinced that because technology advances have made remote work viable, we’d be silly not to ride the horse in the direction it seems to be going. You might be right, but I am always reminded of those very dangerous words that creep up every time I think they are going away forever: “This time is different.”

I have written before about leverage in getting your way. It can be an effective tactic as a matter of last resort, but it is seldom a path to trust, long-term relationships, and compounding progress. If the only reason you are allowed to work remotely is that you think your employer has no other choices, I wonder whether you really want to work for that company. If there is a mutual understanding about workplace arrangements that benefits you and your employer in agreeing to a schedule that helps you with childcare, quiet time to think on your own, and still leaves room for in-person collaboration, that’s one thing. If either side is making a demand of the other, that seems like a shaky platform to advance together.

Some types of professions like software engineering seem particularly well suited to remote working as has been evinced by decades of sharing libraries and contributing to enterprise projects, where most of the engineer’s time is spent on individually created program code that is later assembled with other modules. Even then, when I see software engineers in a room with marketing and finance professionals, I often see exponential progress in shorter windows of time.

Don’t undervalue intangibles. Learning to read a room can help you secure unexpected allies to support a controversial strategy. The most unassuming bits of advice acquired from unfamiliar colleagues in the breakroom can be life-changing. Lifelong friendships emerge and develop from unplanned acts of empathy and compassion. You can say all of that plus mentorship and coaching are available electronically and you’ll be right. The in-person impacts you might be underestimating are tone, degree, and happenstance.

When we are together, we learn from each other. We have peripheral vision that lets us see not just what Zoom or Teams puts on the video screen, but what catches our attention in the corner of our eye. We take in winning and losing arguments and approaches. We have the unique opportunity to establish and build company culture.

My advice: Don’t wait for the company directive, don’t even wait to be asked politely. If you have the opportunity, be in the room.

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Photo: Pexels

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The Thing About Vin

This month I suspect the nation is accidentally divided into two unsuspecting camps: Those hearing the beloved name Vin Scully for the first time, and those who feel the world has lost a soul whose voice permeated their imagination for what seems like forever. I probably don’t have to tell you, but my tent is in Camp Two.

I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to the touching tributes to Vin all month now, waiting for the words to come to me that might add something different to the mix. Like so many fans of baseball, I am finding it impossible to quantify the impact Vin has had on the game and my life. Let me try to get there by focusing on what Vin brought into our lives that exceeds anything to do with a child’s game played by adults for well over a century on our pastoral fields of dreams.

Vin was decent in a way that defines decency. Try to think of anyone in the public eye where you never hear a single bad word uttered about him. People like this about someone but not that, people argue about the talents and abilities of professionals, people offer pointed critiques of someone’s shortfalls despite their success. I’ve never heard anyone utter a cross comment about Vin. Never. It’s uncanny. I can’t think of anyone else who fits that bill.

Vin was a storyteller of the highest order. We frequently overuse the word storytelling to describe the sequencing of events that constitute an unfolding narrative, but Vin turned broadcasting into art and baseball into a series of real-time epics built from a foundation of plot and character. You never had to love the Dodgers to love the resonance of Vin’s unmistakable voice. You listened to the anecdotes excerpted from the lives of MLB players told gracefully between balls, strikes, hits, and runs. You never missed a play, and every chapter of the story added up to a portrait of an era.

Vin brought us together. Whether you were sitting in Dodger Stadium with a transistor radio earplug hanging below your ballcap, watching a big screen with rowdy strangers in a sports bar, or sitting at home texting friends and family while Vin did the play-by-play alone in the booth, everyone choosing to participate in the day’s game came together as part of the event. Vin was inclusive, and he made us inclusive. Our differences didn’t matter on game day when he had the mic. His friendship was our friendship. Vin made sure everyone felt welcome to be part of his 67 years of telling campfire stories while athletes performed them in stadiums linked to historic moments.

“Hi, everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you.”

“If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky.”

“A Black man is getting a standing ovation in the deep South for breaking the record of an all-time baseball idol.”

“In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened.”

“I know in my heart that I’ve always needed you more than you’ve needed me.”

Vin turned simple words into profound statements, moments into musical notes, radio and television commentary into sound bites for the ages. Today that might seem corny, impossible to pull off without sounding dated or forced. I guess when you have the perspective of almost seven decades to evolve your act, whatever you say is instantly perfect. It’s jazz. You’ve rehearsed as much as anyone alive, so you can improvise without a worry. You also instinctively know when quiet beats loud.

The stories of Jackie Robinson, Sandy Koufax, Hank Aaron, Don Larsen, Fernando Valenzuela, Don Drysdale, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente — they are each 100% their own, and Vin knew that more than anyone. Vin was forever the reporter, never the story, that was his inviolable commitment. Yet the stories were better because he told them. Everyone knew that. If you had a story in the game, you wanted Vin to tell it, to record it for the ages, to make it vital, enchanting, and historic. Doing the outlandish in a game that has never seen a moment like yours is one thing. Having Vin lock down the tale for all of time is quite another.

As I think about all the kind words I’ve read and heard about how deeply this one humble man touched so many lives, I am repeatedly left breathless by the stories the fans themselves have shared. Fathers and sons who couldn’t find the right words to say to each other turned on the radio and had a catch while Vin called the game. Families who couldn’t afford the price of tickets parked their cars in open spaces, opened the tailgate of an old station wagon, spread a picnic blanket and grilled hot dogs as Vin made them feel like they were at Chavez Ravine. Brooklyn loyalists who never forgave Walter O’Malley for moving the team west generations later got satellite TV and fell in love again with their Dodgers bridged by the same voice who loved the team as much as they always had.

So here’s the thing about Vin, where the legend of simpler times and radio days brings us to the less innocent evolution we’re all trying to navigate with fragments of heart and hope. Some of us are getting older, losing the icons that carried us from youth to adulthood while poignantly keeping us young at heart. Every April baseball season begins with enormous hope, and every October it ends with one World Series champion. We all know the beginning and end of that cycle come with a change in the cast. Some of our favorite players will be gone. Some of the most important people in our lives may be gone. That is the sad and precious reality of our time together. Our memories are both powerful and fragile. When we remember a common voice that triggers the goodness in those memories, biological age for an instant is no longer a thing.

Vin was there for so many of those memories. He had the seat of honor at so many of our tables. He will stay tied to those memories as long as we stay tied to those memories. The gift of his life was to enrich the lives of all those who carry forward those memories. He wanted that even more than to call a perfect game. For Vin, every game was a perfect game.

I’ll give the wind-up to Vin, because I cannot imagine any other way to set up the close and get off the air:

“When I was eight years old, I fell in love with the roar of the crowd coming out of the speaker of a four-legged radio. When you roar, when you cheer, when you are thrilled, for a brief moment I am eight years old again.”

Yep, so am I. Thank you, dear Vin Scully. Your gift of optimism and connection is once in a lifetime, once in a century, once in sports history. Your gift forever keeps us eight years old.

_______________

Photo: Library of Congress

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The Root Word of Contemporary Is Temporary

Sometimes I wonder if the advancing of age and a leaning toward old-fashioned values are a hindrance to relevancy in our contemporary workplace. Then I remember who taught me the most about workplace navigation in the early years of my professional career. It was bosses and colleagues advancing in age and leaning toward old-fashioned values.

I don’t think a bit of traditional thinking about the nature of workplace relationships is incompatible with rapid innovation, agile thinking, evolving workplace paradigms, and aspiring to more meaningful jobs. I think a bit of grounding is precisely what the doctor ordered. We all can learn from each other if we choose to listen.

One of the simplest and most striking plain language aphorisms I learned from a writing teacher many decades ago has never failed to inform my internal litmus test of change management. His name was J.D. McClatchy and he was a renowned poet. To my knowledge, he had no interest in business, but these words he taught me about writing have guided much of my business thinking:

”The root word of contemporary is temporary.”

Why is this gnawing away at me this particular moment? I am seeing a lot of individuals make terrible decisions in real-time that I am reasonably certain they will regret. They are trading the tangible present for a fragile future, often believing their choices are well-considered when they are unintentionally impulsive.

Much has been written of late about the Great Resignation. There is no doubt that Covid madness has wreaked havoc on our psyches. It is likely we will never see our lives the same way again after two rollercoaster years of public policy and uneven human isolation.

Ostensibly as a result, we see people quitting their jobs in record numbers to explore new paths. If handled elegantly, the liberation of a life change can be an enormous expression of creativity and empowerment. I’ve personally done it no fewer than four times in four decades with no regrets.

What’s my secret weapon for not burning bridges to embers? I’ve hung onto some of those old-fashioned values I learned early in my career.

Do what you want, when you want, where you want, and how you want at your own peril. Do it with a bit of finesse, and the mentors who helped get you this far may hang on with your journey quietly in the background for the rest of your ride.

It’s always perfectly fine to change jobs if you’re doing it for reasons that make sense to you, but you’re best served to do it admirably with serious planning, polite accommodation, and decent respect.

How egregious can we get in justifying some of our more lamentable choices? Here are some behaviors I’ve observed of late that I don’t think will serve people well.

A presumed job candidate schedules an interview with a potential employer and simply does not show up for the meeting—no email, no call, just a cold no-show.

A disgruntled employee walks off the job in the middle of a shift, unannounced, without explanation, and never shows up again; not coming back from lunch or break is a slightly less dramatic version of this bizarre concoction.

An even more disgruntled employee takes the extraordinary risk of in-person rage quitting, often accompanied by a cacophony of phrases best not repeated in a mainstream publication.

Someone with direct access to a company’s customers elects to ignore or dismiss the inquiry or encounter of an unsatisfied customer, perhaps with equal drama that leads to rage quitting while soiling a company’s brand.

An individual spontaneously rejects the well-intentioned constructive feedback from a manager’s review, and rather than discuss it with improvement in mind, ceremoniously destroys the relationship with someone who cares about them.

Once-attentive teammates emotionally check out, dial in the least possible effort for as long as they can hide it, and wait for someone in authority to notice.

That’s a quick collection of less than proud moments, don’t you think?

What’s the common lesson in talking yourself out of those behaviors and actions?

Don’t stop caring. Never stop caring.

To my good fortune, I’ve also been observing a steady base of colleagues, co-workers, and friends who aren’t drawn to the opportunism of fickle times. They cared about their jobs and the customers they have been honored to serve in the past. They care equally or more so now. Circumstances may be in flux, but their values are constant. They maintain a North Star of personal expectation. They make promises and keep them without excuse or compromise because that matters to them.

If you haven’t already lived through multiple recessions, it is a certainty that you will. Our economy is cyclical almost by design. Sometimes jobs are plentiful and you have your choice. Sometimes they are scarce and you take what you can get to provide for yourself and your family. Sometimes your skills are in high demand. Just when you think your expert knowledge is unequaled, it can become wildly obviated.

There are four very scary words that pop up every few years that I caution you to approach with skepticism:

“This time is different.”

Of course things are different. We live in a high-stakes world of volatile change. That is the blessing and curse of igniting technologies. It is the very stuff of innovation and unlimited opportunity.

Yet some things are not different.

Integrity. Honesty. Trust. Commitment. Dedication. Dependability. Sacrifice. Selflessness. Caring. Grit.

You can easily convince yourself these are simply old-fashioned words, empty crossword puzzle entries that no longer matter in a world assuring you that personalization and independent reward are all that should matter. If your long-term reputation comes second to your immediate needs, you have made a choice that carries untoward risk.

I’d caution you before that cement hardens to remember what my writing teacher taught me:

The root word of contemporary is temporary.

_______________

Image: Pixabay