Cold calling is often looked at as a low-value task. It’s not fun and it has a tiny rate of effectiveness. You have to spend hours and contact hundreds of people to get very small results. It’s a boring number’s game. But it works.
I see why people hate it so much. I personally have a ton of resistance towards cold calling. I spent a lot of time when I was 19-20 cold calling for painting jobs (I wrote about my first cold calling experience here) and I thought I had earned the right to never have to do it again.
Nobody wants to be the door-to-door salesman or the unsolicited caller interrupting someone’s day, but hidden under all the negative connotations of cold calling is a hugely valuable practice that everybody should experience.
You know the chances are high that the person who answers the door or the phone will hate the fact that you’re trying to talk to them. Bringing yourself to knock on that first door is a mental battle in itself. Once you knock, the process is in motion and all you have to do is wait. Sometimes you get a door angrily slammed in your face, and sometimes you succeed and have a nice conversation, but most of the time they will politely refuse your offer.
The valuable exercise comes in pushing past your fear and forcing yourself to walk up to the door. It’s not a high-value task because of the results it generates, it’s a high-value task because of the effect it has on your psychology. It takes days and weeks of consistency before you get to that point.
Just like anything else, once you get into the habit of doing it, your fear dissipates and it becomes fun. You start to get good at it and realize you can play around with the rules. After experiencing a large number of reps, getting a door slammed in your face from an angry person is no longer a big deal. It becomes a game. It has happened so many times, you realize there isn’t much gravity to the situation at all. Your life doesn’t change at all even if the worst possible thing happens while you are cold-calling (getting the cops called on you or getting a door slammed angrily in your face). You are immune to the negative thoughts of others when you are in your zone cold-calling.
Cold-calling is the act of communicating with people when the odds are against you. It allows you to develop confidence in telling your story despite the voice in your head telling you nobody cares about what you have to say.
If you can maintain your composure pitching your story when somebody is ready to slam a door in your face, imagine how you’ll do when somebody is already interested in what you have to say.