He’s the Zen master of cold calls
Let’s say you sell telephone headsets or dental equipment or corporate videos and your daily responsibility is to “cold call” -- to drum up new accounts on the telephone. Let’s say you find this somewhere between unpleasant and unbearable. Let’s say you put down $109 to listen to an expert tell a roomful of people like you how to conquer cold-calling in three hours.
And then a middle-aged, white-haired man with a thick Texas accent walks onstage and begins talking about some theory of “paradoxical intentions,” which he says was devised by a dead Austrian psychotherapist and concentration-camp survivor.
The expert also tells you to stand up when you cold-call, to put your weight on one leg (it lowers your voice, making you sound more authoritative), to smile (you sound more confident), to wear a headset (so you can clasp your hands behind your back, a posture that says you will not be intimidated). He tells you to structure your phone questions the way the commies used to brainwash our captured soldiers. He tells you to keep lists of the prospects who reject you and call them back every month, again and again and again. (“As long as they’re using my competition, I never give up.”) He bombards you with arcane statistics. (“Eighty-six percent of business cards left in those bowls at trade shows are never called back. Why? Because we hate to cold call!”)
His name is Jerry Hocutt. He’s 57. He used to sell school portraits, then pagers. For the past decade he’s been staging “Cold Calling for Cowards” seminars around the country from his home base in a Seattle suburb.
Let the rest of the country take on the evils of dinnertime intrusions and the legality of do-not-call lists. Hocutt’s paying audience knows the truth: Calling strangers for a living can be hell, and that their particular corner of hell is one the federal do-not-call law does not even attempt to reach. They are the foot soldiers in America’s business-to-business selling game. And Hocutt is their drill sergeant.
To watch Hocutt break down the dynamics of picking up a telephone and calling a stranger is to be reminded how, in a trade where failure grotesquely outnumbers success, salespeople need a slew of rationalizations and other psychological tricks to preserve their confidence.
“How many people here are like me?” he asks the 300 gathered this morning inside a sterile Irvine Hyatt Regency meeting room. “How many of you would like to not have to cold call?” The vast majority raise their hands. For those who didn’t, Hocutt reads off the phone number of the Betty Ford Clinic. “If you like to cold call,” he says sternly, “you need some serious counseling.”
He spends considerable time today on how to get past the person cold-callers call “the gatekeeper” -- the company switchboard operator, often on guard against unsolicited sales calls. You need the gatekeeper to tell you precisely who in the company buys the product or service you’re selling.
He offers tricks to get around recalcitrant gatekeepers: Call after-hours. Or go through Accounts Receivable (they’re usually nicer people than Accounts Payable). Or pick names at random in the voice-mail system until you hear an enthusiastic voice; that might be the person who will lead you to the decision-maker. Or, if the person you want at Ext. 2301 won’t call you back, call Ext. 2302 and ask to be transferred -- they probably sit next to each other.
His audience, a combination of corporate and self-employed salespeople, strains to place this advice. Some find it sophomoric. But many feel small light bulbs going on. Staci Johnston, who works for a plumbing-supply company, likes the alternate-extension calling trick. Bryan Maxwell, who sells telecommunications gear, realizes he might have been wrong about rarely leaving messages on potential customers’ voicemail, convinced they would not call back. Leave your pitch! Hocutt exhorts. In the days ahead Maxwell will start leaving three times as many voice-mail messages, and, to his delight, will start getting a respectable proportion of his messages returned.
Wendy Dahl, who works in a two-person video-production company, reflects on how infrequently she lived up to her pledge to cold-call two to four hours a day. “I was actually leery of this seminar,” Dahl said. “I thought it was going to be the ‘cockroach’ sales approach. But it was definitely psychologically driven, aggressive but not obnoxious ... a lot of people can’t handle it because they take [rejection] personally, but it’s not a personal business.”
There are numerous other cold-calling consultants who throw seminars or offer to visit your company. Amazon.com offers cold-calling books by 10 authors, ranging from Shawn Greene’s “I’d Rather Have a Root Canal Than Do Cold Calling” to Wendy Weiss’ “Cold Calling for Women.” But it’s doubtful anybody takes as eclectic an approach to the Zen of cold-calling as Hocutt.
Start with that “paradoxical intentions” theory, the creation of psychotherapist Victor Frankl. Think about it this way, Hocutt says: If you get butterflies in your stomach when you cold-call, imagine lots of them -- a million of them. Try to make yourself anxious. What you’ll find is, you can’t voluntarily activate your autonomous nervous system: The more you want something, the more elusive it becomes. So you’ll stay calm. That’s the paradox.
Hocutt employs so-called right-brain pop psychology to draw up more flexible phone scripts. He sprinkles allusions to “neuro-linguistic programming,” contending that a salesperson can alter outcomes by changing the initial “picture” in his mind. He preaches a phone technique called “commitment and consistency” -- the belief that if you keep asking questions that can be answered in the affirmative, you have a better chance of eventually making a sale or at least getting in the door. Chinese army interrogators used this technique to gain compliance from American POWs during the Korean War, psychologist Robert Cialdini writes in “The Psychology of Persuasion,” which Hocutt stocks on his seminar book-sale table.
Hocutt has studied handshakes. (Sixty-eight percent of decision-makers shake hands with their palm facing down to force the other person into a submissive handshake posture, he says.) He has studied personality types and correlated how many call-backs it takes to win a decision from each type. He has studied persistence.
All this gives him license to proclaim to his audience: “Forty-four percent of the people sitting here will stop calling after the first rejection. Twenty-two percent will stop after the second. Fourteen percent will stop after the third. Twelve percent will stop after the fourth. But 70% of the decision makers [depending on their personality type] won’t make a decision until the fifth call.”
“How well do you do the ordinary things?” he will ask several times today. He sounds like a batting coach, obsessed with the overlooked intricacies, and it turns out he first heard that question asked by Lou Piniella, then manager of his hometown Seattle Mariners, as a way of stressing fundamentals. “This ain’t rocket science.”
Hocutt was the kind of kid who made potholders and sold them door to door at age 12. He thought about law school but wound up in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. Later he became a school-portrait salesman, then switched to pagers for a large communications firm.
He hated cold-calling. “I’d put it off every day.” Then his father mailed him a book by an artist who professed to teach drawing on the right side of the brain -- a philosophy that encouraged people to “turn off” their sequential, logical impulses and surrender to their intuitive ones. It clicked with Hocutt’s need for sales techniques that would help him suppress doubts.
By the 1990s he felt burned out by selling. Subjected to a boring sales-training workshop, he decided he could do better and started his own seminar business, twice mortgaging his home to get the seminars off the ground. Gradually he began using his wife, daughters and in-laws and says he now employs nine family members full time to coordinate the seminars, which he holds roughly once a week. He is not a stylish speaker -- he’s had Northerners complain they can’t fathom his accent -- but his plain-spokenness wins people over. “I don’t do motivational-type speaking,” he says. “I’m a tool teacher.”
Still, on this morning he sends his charges off with a homily: “Contrary to what you’ve heard, opportunity does not knock. You knock -- and opportunity answers.”
