Some companies like to interview and test for cold call reluctance. They theorize that if a person is shy about making calls, he/she should not be selling for a living. That analysis and conclusion may be too simple to be valid.
In reality, high-Drive salespeople are most interested in spending their time on things that will help them achieve their goals. For example, a running back in the NFL is always searching for ways to improve his diet and exercise routine to maximize his ability to run fast, elude tacklers and endure. His fellow teammate, the lineman, has a whole different agenda, constantly trying to gain, or at least maintain, great weight and strength, learning blocking techniques and concentrating on the power he can generate over short bursts at the line. If either of these athletes were asked to spend time—or from their perspective, waste time—on the others’ routines—which would not help them reach their goals—they would surely protest, if they even participated at all.
High-Drive salespeople are the same way. If cold calling will really help them sell as well as other techniques, they will be all over it. But if they have figured out that cold calling, for whatever reason in a given context, does not produce results and that their time is better spent on the road visiting prospects in person, for example, then it is not a matter of cold call reluctance . . . it is a matter of determining how they feel they can best reach their goals.
The point is that we need to be careful what we are testing for and we need to be sure that someone—who is very qualified—is determining, via solid metrics, how productive a given activity such as cold calling really is . . . because we can guarantee that high-Drive salespeople will always seek the fastest route toward high performance and production if given validated alternatives to do so.
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Dr. Christopher Croner and Richard Abraham are authors of Never Hire a Bad Salesperson Again and developers of the proprietary and patented sales test, The DriveTest™, for sales candidates. For more information, click here.