Earning My Dinner

Lately, I've been getting a TON of telemarketing robo-calls! Gone are the good 'ol days of interacting with a human cold caller, which I actually used to be! Yes, I was that annoying person who likely called during dinner time, but at least I apologized!

My role at the time was to get as many people to say YES that they were interested in "…a free brochure about this service" (part of my script), these coveted individuals were called prospects.  You lived and died by the number of prospects you were able to get each week. 

At the time I worked in a big room with several other cold callers and that's all we did.  Most of us had a game plan of some kind, while others didn’t realize what they got themselves into and made token calls while searching the web for other jobs.

Most of my colleagues counted how many phone numbers they dialed regardless of whether they talked to someone or not. As soon as they hit their magic number of "dials" (say 200), they felt like they put in a full day's work, even if it was early in the day.

I knew I couldn't control people saying "yes" and becoming a prospect, but what I could control was the number of people I actually spoke to.  I made it a daily goal to speak to 65 people "contacts" which may have took 300-400 dials or more. My focus was on actually talking to people instead of going through the motions of dialing numbers. I needed to talk to 65 people a day (or more) otherwise I simply didn't go home.  

Most nights I would leave work around 8:30pm after talking to my 65th person, likely getting yelled at. However, I was actually really excited to talk to them because, what they didn't know was that, they were my ticket to go home and finally "deserve" dinner.  My belief was that if I didn't hit my contact goal (not number of dials), I didn't DESERVE to go home or eat…it was a simple as that.

As you can imagine the turnover of people that worked there was nonstop, it was like a monthly guillotining. We would find out who got axed when the assistant office manager would come to their desk and unceremoniously put their personal belongings in a box for them to pick up later.  As soon as their personal items were gone, the rest of us descended onto the desk of the terminated cold caller and scour for fresh call lists they may not have used. We looked like vultures gnawing on the corpse of the fallen, that’s how it was back then…we needed fresh leads to get enough prospects to avoid facing the same fate!

While I was joining in on the feeding frenzy I made it a point to look at the ex-caller's call sheet to look for clues and try to diagnose why they didn't survive.  Almost every single one of them was tracking dials and not actual contacts…they were putting in "work" but not the right kind of work that would give them a better chance to yield results that ultimately would have saved their jobs.

Thankfully, I survived and learned to apply the evolutionary theory I learned throughout this experience.

Having a plan isn't enough, the most critical element of success is finding the closest activity you can control to the end goal and focusing and measuring that. 

In the story I shared, going to work every day is admirable but not close enough to the desired end result, making dials was a goal but still too far from the "Yes!", the most pure activity that I had control over towards the YES! was talking to people…it was the closest and most directly correlated activity I could do to getting a YES!

At the end of the day, it's about "keeping the main thing, the main thing", and keeping track of what really matters.  This concept applies to work, the gym, relationships, etc…Seeing results all boils down to, 'am I doing/tracking dials or contacts.”