3: Phone and Voicemail Strategies

Hey everybody, it's Jon Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays. Hopefully you're all doing all right today. It's President's Day, so it's one of those light days. I actually love days like this, these kind of half holidays, because usually the phones aren't lighting up, email's not too heavy, and it's a great opportunity to kind of get your shit together, kind of clean up some of the tasks, get prepared for the weeks, do some planning, those type of things. So I'm actually pretty fired up today to check a few of those things off the list that have been sitting there for a while. But hopefully you're doing the same. I'm not expecting a huge turnout today because of the holiday, but for those of you who are watching, thanks.

And also, nice work, right? Because you're the ones that are going to excel. So today, what we're going to do on episode number three of Make It Happen Mondays is we're going to talk about phone. You know, I do a lot of training, and a lot of it's on email and contact strategy and that type of stuff. And phone is one of those things that keeps coming up. People keep asking, you know, hey, John, should I even leave? You know, what's the point? Why should I make phone calls? Nobody calls me back. It's like, you know, I make 100 phone calls to get one conversation. Why should I leave voicemails? And so we're going to talk about some just tips and ideas and structure today that you can apply on the phone because, like it or not, the phone is part of the equation.

It's not the only thing. Like, if your managers are out there saying, you know, screw phone, screw social, I'm sorry, screw email, screw social, just hit the phones, 100 dials a day, that type of stuff, then I'm worried, right? Because that's absolutely not the right way to go these days. It's a mix of all of it, right? And so I'm going to back up a little bit and specifically talk about my generation versus the generation that's coming out right now, the millennials or whatever, and some of the fundamental problems with phone and how we can address them. So one thing is, you know, I'm 41 years old. So when I grew up in sales, it was, that was it. It was the phone. I mean, email was starting to creep in.

But if I was on the, if I was on email, my boss was like, what the hell are you doing on email? Like, get on the damn phones. It was the whole old school boiler room, recco, you know, that type of shit. And so that's the way I grew up on in sales. And, and I think that that was really good as a matter of fact, because it just got me more comfortable talking to people, more comfortable just interrupting people. And, and also phone was, was the main means of communication. You know, growing up, it's like, you know, you had that phone that had the cord on it. You had to drag it all the way into your room to have some privacy about it for me. And the millennial generation that, you know, 22, 20, you know, to between 30 and 35 and stuff, you guys didn't grow up with the phones.

All right. Um, actually there's study after study that I've been reading these days that talks about how millennials think that the phone is rude because it's an interruption and you're impeding on somebody else's time. Right. Um, so it's, it's, it's kind of rude to just take that time when it's unannounced. And so you add that to the fact that, you know, so millennials didn't grow up with a phone. So it's uncomfortable anyways. Then you talk about the, the open office environment, right? I love the open office environment for collaboration and those types of things. But I'll tell you one thing, man, it crushes the phone. It crushes phone productivity. Cause say you're the only kid you're like, say you're, you're sitting there in the open office environment and you're like, you know what, fuck it.

I want, I want to make some phone calls. If you're the only one making phone calls in your whole area, I guarantee it's, you feel like everybody in the entire office is listening to every single word that's coming out of your mouth. Right. And, and for me, I'm actually a pretty confident cat, right? So for me, and, and, but even still, when I was on the phones, even back then, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if I was the only one making phone calls, I'd be up there, my headset on making some phone calls. And then all of a sudden I'd kind of catch that, you know, I'd say something a little off or whatever. And somebody would just kind of give me that look, like, what did you just say? And if I would've catch that look, I'd fall apart and be like, oh, shit, uh, fuck, never mind.

So for me, I still need to, had to go and lock myself in a conference room by myself and put my headset on so I could really get the most out of phone. And so you add the fact that if you're younger, you didn't grow up with the phone, um, to the fact that it's just not as effective as it was anymore because people aren't even picking up the phone. And then the open office environment, you totally understand why the trend is away from the phone. But I will say a couple of things to pay attention to 40 somethings, whether you like it or not, you know, gen Xers and above, we're the decision makers these days. We grew up on the phones. So I still like talking on the phones, right? Maybe to, you know, uh, you know, maybe not, you know, Hey, cold call every, you know, I'll pick up every cold call, but I enjoy having conversations with people.

And I was sitting on a panel a while back at some, uh, at a conference and actually I wasn't on a panel. The, um, there was four executives on a panel, CEO, CFO, and all these different ones. And somebody called, you know, raised their hand and was like, Hey, you know, what's the newest, coolest app that people are using to be effective these days and getting in touch with executives and literally all of them in unison said the phone. And they hadn't practiced that by the way. They all like, yeah, the phone. Like I still take phone calls. Now the problem is, is people just suck at making phone calls and they, they're even worse than leaving voicemails. You know, that's like, you know, again, the question, okay, make a phone call, maybe catch somebody.

Right. But John, what if I get a voicemail? Like nobody calls me back. So that's those pieces are why phone is an important part. The last point I'll make of why phone is important. Then I'll get into some tips on how to address it is, um, different people like to communicate in different ways. There's something, if you guys want to go research it, it's called neuro linguistic programming NLP for short. There's a book on this one. You can go look up. It's called selling with NLP, the unfair advantage. And it talks about how different people like communicating in different ways. And there's three types. There's two types of words in the English language. There's sensory words, and then there's digital words.

Digital words are words like analyze, benefit, capability, change, those type of things. And, you know, they make us sound intelligent, but they do nothing to wake us up. Where sensory words actually connect with our senses. Um, and the three main senses are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Kinesthetic is touch and feel. And the study said that the world is broken down into a third, a third, a third. A third of us are visual, a third of us are auditory, and a third of us are kinesthetic. And if, and it doesn't mean if you're one, you're not the other. It just means you lean more towards one than the other. So as an example, visuals talk fast and they use their hands to communicate. Obviously, I'm a pretty visual communicator.

That's why I like video. That's one of my favorite forms of communication and distributing content. I'm not a big blog. I like, I write blogs, but they're paying the ass. I'd rather do this, um, uh, they, visuals use words like aim, appear, blind, blush, brilliant, show, paint me a picture here is what a visual would say. Whereas an auditory, a little bit more slower paced, a little bit more active listeners. They use words like rave, resonate, articulate, amplify. The best way to sell to an auditory is actually over the phone. These are people who will talk to you all day long, but their emails are only one or two lines. And then there's kinesthetics. Kinesthetics are, are much more slower paced, much more active listeners.

They really think through their answers before they give them to you. They use words like cut, tackle, concrete, walk me through is a very kinesthetic thing to say. Best way to sell to a kinesthetic is actually face to face. The second best way is email because they can touch it and take their time. The third and worst way is over the phone. These are the people who will write well thought out, very detailed emails, but almost never want to talk to you. All right. So because I have no idea what type of communicator you are, I got to mix it up, right? With my contact strategy. So, because if I send five emails to an auditory, my chances of you responding drop. If I make five phone calls to a kinesthetic, my chance of you responding drop.

That's why I got to mix it up. So that's why email, call, email, social, send something in the mail every once in a while, whatever. Just try to hit all three. But everything I'm doing, everything that I'm doing initially is to get you on the phone. Because here's some more stats to throw at you. I forget what this guy's, Dr. Albert, whatever the guy's name is. But he put together a study of how people communicate and it's broken down 8, 35, 57. 8% is the words that we use, right? So that's email, effectively. Well, that was awesome. Love Wi-Fi connections at home. Booted me off there. So, anyways, take two. Hopefully, let's try to tie these two together. I don't know how Facebook Live works as far as posting shit.

But hopefully that first one, hopefully we recorded it. So, anyways, what we're talking about again with Make It Happen Mondays here is getting on the phones. And what I was saying earlier in the previous one, like I said, hopefully it posted there. But if not, we can redo this. Is that those three types of communicators, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. And they all communicate in different ways. Which is why we need to mix up the context, right? Which is why phone is important. And, again, the other piece of it here is the way that people communicate. 8, 35, 57. 8% is the words. 35% is the tonality. And 57% is body language. And so phone is really only 43% of the way that we communicate.

Which is why face-to-face is actually better than phone. But phone 43 is better than the email, which is 8. And that's why everything that I try to do is to get people on the phone. So I mix up my contact strategy and everything is to try to say, okay, what's the best way to get, you know, 10 minutes on your calendar so I can have this conversation? Because over the phone I can develop rapport. I can build, you know, I can handle objections a little bit more effectively. And there's a relationship there. Because over email it's not. And so that's why I think phone is still extremely important to, as a, first of all, as a skill set to develop. But second of all, as a means of communicating with people and as a means of getting in touch with people.

And so today I want to share with you just some tips and ideas and some structure around things you can do over the phone just to be more effective. And try different things out. You've heard me talk about this before if you follow any of my stuff, that the number one thing I think all of us can do to get better, that much better, that much faster, is A-B split test everything you do, right? So try two different approaches for one, you know, issue. So if you're going after CFOs, for instance. Come up with two different messages to a CFO based on their priorities or something like that. Call 20 of them and say this. Call 20 of them and say that. See which one yields a higher response rate, all right?

So with that, let's talk about voicemails for a minute here. You know, the reason why most people don't leave voicemails is because they suck at leaving voicemails. You know, their voicemails are, they all sound exactly the same, right? Hi, this is John Barrows with Jay Barrows Consulting. We do sales training consulting for Fortune 500 companies. I'd love to talk to you about your sales training needs. Call me back. My old company, Thrive Networks. Hi, John. Hi, this is John Barrows with Thrive Networks. We do outsourced IT support for small and mid-sized companies in the Boston area. Take a really unique approach to manage your IT infrastructure. But I can find out the best one people technology have to offer.

Love to talk to you about your sales or your IT support needs. Or, you know, there's just no value in it. So they give a decent value proposition, but there's no value in it for the person. And you've got to think of to yourself, if you're leaving a voicemail or sending an email to somebody, what do you think of the most valuable asset any of us have? It's time. So if you want my time, it's going to be pretty damn clear that I'm going to get something out of this. And so that's why you've got to have something in your voicemails. It prompts me to say, well, shit, maybe I should spend my time, you know, giving this person a callback. Because there's going to be something in it for me outside of just to help understand what my 2017 priorities are and how we can help you achieve your goals, which is just stupid.

So a couple of things here. I leave voicemails, not because I expect callbacks, but because when I leave voicemails, my email response rate goes up pretty significantly. All right. So I love the call email approach where you call and you say, hey, the reason for my call today is blah, blah, blah. And by the way, I'm going to send you an email too. So if you want to respond to me that way, you can. Or vice versa. You send an email and then right afterwards, hey, it's 235 on Wednesday afternoon. I just want to let you know I just sent you an email about this. If you want to take a look at it, call or email me back. I'd appreciate it. That gets a pretty high response rate as it compares to just voicemails or just emails.

So that's one thing. The other thing, going back to 835, 57 and how we communicate. Again, you're only dealing with 43% of the way that people communicate. So if you're only dealing with 43%, you better make it worth it. So here's a couple of tips. If you're having a bad day, send emails. If you're having a good day, get on the phones. Also, when you're making phone calls, stand up. Stand up when you're making phone calls. Because when you stand up, your voice projects way better. It's a much more confident position than this. Me walking around inside sales organizations, I can't tell you who's crushing it on the phones. I can tell you who's not crushing it on the phones. They all look exactly the same.

All the people who aren't crushing it on the phones, they're the ones who are hunched over in their cube or in their desk, leaving voicemails like this, praying to God that the person next to them isn't actually listening to what they're having to say. I'm not saying the ones with the headsets on all loud and obnoxious and walking around the office or making it rain. I'm saying those people aren't, all right? So, when you're making phone calls, stand up. And also, don't, I think actually sprinkling phone calls throughout the day is a drastic waste of time. So, if you're going to make two or three phone calls and then send a couple of emails and make some phone calls and send some emails, I think that is just a drastic waste of time.

Because you can't learn anything that way. You can't get in on the momentum about that. So, but where I know phone can be effective is when you hyper-focus for like an hour. And I call them power hours where you're not just making cold calls for an hour, but you're making cold calls into one very specific persona or one very specific scenario with one very specific message for an hour. So, for instance, I'm going to call every VP of sales in the SaaS industry that uses Salesforce under 25 million. And I'm going to come up with a message for that group. And I'm going to call all of them and say the same damn thing over and over and over again. Hey, the reason for my call today is blah, blah, blah.

You know, I want to call you back. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. Because the first few phone calls are going to be a little rough, but then all of a sudden you kind of catch that groove. And cold calling sales in general is about momentum, right? And you make three, four, five, six phone calls. All of a sudden you kind of catch that, all right, I'm in this. And then what happens to us, though, is we kill that momentum. Because when somebody says, okay, we get a good conversation. And somebody says, all right, John, sounds interesting. Why don't you send me some information? Most people stop everything they're doing. They write this nice custom piece of information like it's the only one they've ever sent before.

And then, you know, and they hit send and they feel like they kind of did something. So they stop, get up, you know, freshen up the coffee or whatever it is, walk around a little bit. And right there you just crush your momentum, all right? So then you've got to get back on the horse again. It takes a while to get going. So for me, for that hour, I do usually a half hour prep for a one hour call blitz. Well, during that prep, I'll figure out who my target audience is going to be, what my message is going to be. You know, what are some maybe two or three questions I can ask them and, you know, get my numbers right so I'm not doing research or any of that crap. And then just hammer it for an hour.

And I track, you know, how many calls, how many referrals, how many meetings did I set up, right? Just to keep a little back and napkin math, a little notepad by your desk, one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five. Because for an hour, if I prep, do a half hour prep for a one hour call blitz, I can usually bang out $20, $25 in an hour, no problem. And so, you know, you do that once in the morning, once in the afternoon. There's your 50 dials if that's what your numbers are. And you've also learned something. So, because if I were to tell you right now, you know, make 50 dials in a day and you sprinkle them throughout the day. First of all, it's hard to get there. Second of all, the only thing you have to measure if you're not paying attention is how many meetings that you got from those 50 dials, right?

And if you get zero, that's a horrible day. That's one of those days where you go home and you're like, God, what am I doing here, right? But if you, say I say make 50 dials and make $25 with this approach and $25 with that approach, and you still get no meetings, to me that's actually not a bad day. Because you just figured out two approaches that don't work. And tomorrow you come in and try to figure out two more, right? And the more you try that out, the better results you're going to get, all right? So you'll start to figure things out. So that's why in that hour, you know, I can hyper-focus, I can learn something, and I can get hyped up for that hour, right? Getting hyped up for an entire day's worth of cold calling, not a chance.

For an hour, you know what? Grab a couple of Red Bulls, get a couple of people around me going with this. Let's nail it. I can do that for an hour, and I can be very effective, all right? So those power-ups, by the way, here's one more that I love doing, and this goes back to that open office environment. I really recommend you grab the people around you and run that call blitz in that hour together. So everybody's just a little bit of noise to it. Everybody's kind of working off and learning from each other, listening in. And there's another way to do this, which is where you take four people most, at most, four people at most. And you grab a conference room, and then you grab a speakerphone.

And everybody makes round-robin dials on the speakerphone. So first person calls up, right, because, hold on, I'm trying to get Wi-Fi here from my laptop now that that crashed. But, you know, first, so we're sitting in the room, there's four of us, and I make a phone call on the speakerphone. And say the secretary of the receptionist picks up and just shreds me, like completely embarrasses me, whatever. Well, and hangs up on me mid-sentence, right? So first of all, everybody else is laughing because it's fun to watch train wrecks live. Second of all, you're up next. You're going to do what I just did? Obviously not. You're going to do something totally different. So, and say you do something smooth, and you have a good conversation, and you get through and get a meeting, right?

Well, then the next person up, they're going to do what you did and avoid what I did. And, you know, as you go around, you will learn more in that scenario than you will ever learn in any training you will ever go to in your entire lives. Including this, including my stuff, right? Because that, it's not role play, which is the fake kind of bullshit, whatever. But it's, um, it's more live application, but it's learning with that live application. I would really recommend pulling your boss into this, too. Show them, see them what, uh, see what they, uh, I used to do this with my reps to show them. There wasn't no, there wasn't any magic bullet to this. Like, I was, you know, I was just as good or not as good as them.

You know, I got hung up on just like they did, right? And we can all learn something from each other. So, so try that. Um, another nugget here is, uh, when you're making phone calls, don't touch, first of all, remove touching base and checking in from your vocabularies. It means there's no reason for your call, so therefore there's no reason for me to talk to you. Second of all, um, well, and replace it with this phrase. It's one of my favorite nuggets. Um, the phrase, the reason for my call is, finish that sentence. If you cannot finish that sentence, you shouldn't be making the phone calls, all right? And it better be something better than I want to sell you something. So, you know, hey, the reason for my call today was on your website.

I noticed you guys are doing some cool stuff. I want to have a conversation about how you're leveraging whatever. Hey, the reason for my call today is we're working with other CFOs in the healthcare industry, showing them how to do this. And I thought it might be worth a conversation. Those type of things, right? The reason for my call, the reason for my call. Because if you don't, if you can't finish that sentence, like I said, you shouldn't be making the phone calls. Um, so we got to think of those, what those reasons are. Obviously, and that takes a little bit of homework to do, but it's actually not that hard. Again, when you're prospecting, remember, you're not selling your prospect. You're not selling your product or your services.

You can't, you can't sell your product or service in a 30 second pitch. You can't sell it in an email. So stop trying. What you can sell is time. You can sell the next step. That's what you're selling when you're cold calling and when you're prospecting, right? So the whole, you know, Glen Gary, Glen Ross, AIDA, right? Um, attention, interest, desire, action. That is the fundamental process of sales. Uh, 1898, a guy by the name of St. Elmo Lewis came up with it. He said, these are the four mental stages we all need to go through before we buy something. First, something needs to get our attention. Then we have to be interested. Then we have to have a desire. Then we have to move to act. And so if you think about how long do we have to get someone's attention these days, we literally have seconds to get their attention.

That's why the elevator pitch tends to fail because the elevator pitch is 30, 45 seconds at best. If you take a breath, if you don't take a breath. Um, that's why subject lines are so important because seconds to get people's attention. And then in that five to 15, that earns us an extra couple of minutes where we can have a conversation or anything, you know, you maybe ask a question or two. And then in that two minutes, that earns us a meeting where we schedule time on the calendar. Um, nugget here is don't sell time. Don't sell, uh, your services when prospecting. Sell time. Sell the next step. I, you know, and don't sell meetings. Don't say, I'd like to meet with you because nobody has any good feelings about meetings.

All right. When you say, I'd like to meet with you, usually the number that pops into most people's head is an hour and nobody has any, like, yeah, they're usually a waste of time. So quantify what you're asking. It's the best way to get 15 minutes on your calendar. What's the best way to get 30 minutes on your calendar? Quantify it. That's what you're selling. You're selling the next step. Right? So I'm going to, we have a couple minutes left here on this cut in half, uh, Facebook live post. Um, one of the things that, uh, that I wanted to make sure that you walked away with is just from that messaging standpoint, you know, don't puke all over. People with all those speeds and feeds and bits and bites and leading provider of type of shit, um, get after them with what I call attention grabbers.

And the easiest way to come up with messaging here is to look at your case studies. If you got them and look at the bottom of your case studies and say, what result did we drive for the client for that client? Okay. So we showed this client in this industry, how to drive these types of results that becomes your attention grabber. Now find everybody in your territory that fits that profile. Start making some phone calls, call them all up. Remember that power hour one, right? Hey, the reason for my call today is we showed this company in your industry, how to drive these types of results. I'd love to have a conversation with you about it. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. See what happens.

That's the attention grabber, not the elevator pitch, right? Try to avoid leading provider of speeds and feeds and bits and bites. Nobody cares about that, all right? So anyways, there's one more. There's a couple of questions here from Johnston. So thank you, Johnston, for this. And, you know, being one of the people that hang in there with me, it says, how do you incorporate phone calls, touch points in an enterprise multi-thread sales approach for companies with a thousand plus employees? This is a divide and conquer, man. Section it out. So really tier out those, you know, I usually tier out my accounts, not only, you know, I got my great accounts, my average accounts, my crap accounts, so tier one, tier two, tier three, but I also look within those accounts.

So usually C-levels and VPs are my tier ones. Directors and, you know, that type of thing are tier twos and managers or frontline managers and end users are tier threes. And that's how I approach. So tier ones is always the quality approach where I sit down, I kind of think through what my contact strategy is and I mix it up between phone and email. And always coming at them with something different. You know, that contact strategy, again, I've talked about this in previous sessions. The critical component of a contact strategy is the unique factor of, first of all, saying, you know, using a different form of communication every single time, mixing it up, but also saying something different every single time, right?

So you kind of carve up, if you were to look at my value proposition, for instance, there's two ways people tend to prospect. One is the generic elevator pitch approach where it's, hey, we do sales training consulting for fortune 500 companies that guarantees you the results you're looking for at every stage of the sales process. And that doesn't work. Well, the other way is they do, hey, we do sales training consulting and we do prospecting, meeting execution, negotiation, objection, you know, and closing. Those are the five things I do. And I could probably wrap a nice tight little message around that. But the problem is, say I leave you that voicemail or send you that email and you don't respond.

What's my next email? What's my next voicemail? So, you know, it's touching base, checking in, you get my first email and that's that. So instead, my first email to you is going to be about prospecting. You don't like that one? Whatever. My next phone call to you is going to be about negotiation. You don't like that one? I don't care. Here comes another email about meeting execution. And I'm just going to kind of carve it up and keep poking at you. And so going to your question here, if I were to look at it, I would say, okay, let me tear up my accounts. Let me tear up within those accounts for these enterprise. And I'm a big top-down seller. So I usually start up there. I'm not saying bottom-up's bad.

I'm just saying it's actually easier to go this way. And I'm going to craft a message and a contact strategy to each one of the titles, right? Because my value to a CFO is different than my value is to a CEO. It's different than my value is to a CIO. So I want to craft my message about what value do I bring to each one of those, come up with a contact strategy, go after them. Sometimes I might go after the CEO. My contact strategy is six unique touches in 30 days. So sometimes I'll go after the CEO, six unique touches in 30 days. And if they don't respond, then I'll go after the CFO, six touches in 30 days, and tweak up the message a little bit. Other times, if it's a big enough account and I really want to get in there and there's a lot of stuff to talk about, I'll go after all of them at the same time.

I just want to make sure that my contact strategy is a little bit, you know, again, tweaked so it's not the same message to everybody. And then to get the volume up there, that's where, you know, the tier twos come into play. You know, the directors or maybe frontline VPs, depending on how large the organization is. And I might come up with a message that says, hey, you know what? We show directors in this industry how to drive these type of results and here's a case study or something like that. And maybe send that out to the group of them. But a targeted message, not just a generic whatever, but a targeted message to that role, you know, for whatever reason. And then, you know, my tier threes, that's where I'm just going to probably just blast out a template email for whatever.

But that listening and coming up with reasons and thoughtful contact strategies is what differentiates you over all the other marketing crap that's out there. Because right now there's account-based marketing, account-based selling, all this dumb shit, which is all focused around the customer and being relevant. And people are trying to take shortcuts around that. They're trying to automate that process. And I'm telling you right now, there's so much noise out there right now. The number one thing you can do to crack through that noise is to elevate the quality and the relevance so that, you know, again, the reason I'm reaching out to you specifically. And also a contact strategy that consists of more than one or two messages that, you know, are pointed towards me, right?

Five, six, seven, eight. I'm going to actually write a blog post coming up here. I don't think it's going to be this week. It's going to be next week where somebody reached out to me finally with more than five touches that were all thoughtful and tailored to me. And I'm giving the guy a call just because of that. And I'm doing a soft survey now with a lot of executives that I'm talking to. And I'm asking them, hey, when was the last time a rep actually reached out to you with a thoughtful message that was different more than three, four, five, six times, right? And every executive I talked to was like, nope, it hasn't happened. I can't tell you the last time it's happened. I asked them, hey, if somebody did and came at you with a different point of value and thought through and maybe read through and found this and whatever, hey, what about that?

And put together five, six, seven touches, would you respond to them? Most of them are like, yeah, absolutely. Just out of sheer, you know, appreciation for the approach, if nothing else. So this is why mixing it up, phone, email. You never know if those emails are getting stuck in the spam filters. Phone might prompt them to go look at it. Social is obviously a huge part of that, which we'll talk about in one of these sessions as well. But, again, the main thing today is get on those phones, right? It's a skill set that's going to help you out through the rest of your career. Don't be afraid of it. The worst thing that people can do on the phone is hang up on you. Unless you're being offensive or rude or something like that, then they're going to call your boss.

I've done that before, trust me, where I've called some kid out because he's such a douche. But, if you're respectful, you have a reason to call, the worst thing that can happen is they hang up on you. So don't be afraid. Stand up. Get on the phones. Hyper-focused for an hour. Yeah, exactly, Johnson. No's the second best answer, right? Yes is the best answer in sales. No's the second best. Maybe your no response is the worst. So have some fun with it, too. Just realize we're not curing cancer here, everybody. That's why I grab a couple of friends, grab a couple of Red Bulls, and fuck around for a little bit. See what happens. I promise you, the mentality you have going into it dictates the results, right?

I always talk to my daughter. Focus on what you can eat. Effort, attitude, and treat people, right? You can focus on your effort. You can focus on your attitude. You can focus on what you can control, which is what you can eat. Effort, attitude, and how you treat people. With cold calling, a lot of it has to do with effort and attitude, all right? So get on the phones. Have some fun. Today is actually not a bad day to make phone calls. I mean, like I'm sitting here in my office. My phone isn't ringing. My emails aren't there. Shit, somebody calls me up. I might pick it up. I'm in a pretty chill mood, too. I might be open to having a conversation. I bet you a ton of executives are in their office right now.

Go higher, go home. Make some phone calls. Make it happen. Let me know if you guys have any questions or if there's anything I can do. By the way, if you could help me out, I will ask one thing. If you've got any value out of this or if you're going to watch this later and got value out of this, you could do me a favor and like the Facebook page, obviously. Follow me on Snapchat. John M as in Michael Barrows, all one word. And just help me spread some of the social stuff. I'm trying to build up the following here and I'm trying to add recurring value to my audience. And so the more people that get on these type of things and ask questions, the more value I can add. So if you could do me any favors and just help share the love for that, I appreciate it, all right?

All right, everybody. Make it happen. Make it happen. Make it happen.