Yielder And Over-PreparerAs mentioned last month, the next few newsletters will be focused on various aspects of Call and Contact Reluctance. What blocks us from making outbound contacts to either prospects or clients?

Again, we wish to acknowledge the enormous contribution made by George Dudley and Shannon Goodson and their team at Behavioral Sciences Research Press. George and Shannon formalized the Call Reluctance phenomenon in 1979 with the introduction of a robust assessment tool.

One of Redmond’s sales truths:

“Call / Contact Reluctance happens only 100% of the time and is natural part of the sales process”.

So, here are two offerings this month – Yielder and Over-Preparer Call Reluctance.

YIELDER™

The internal dialogue of a Yielder goes something like this:

·“I don’t want to bother the prospect (or client) today.”

·“It’s Monday, the prospect won’t want to hear from me today, they just got back from their weekend.”

·“I don’t want to bother them today, it’s Friday.”

·“It’s too close to lunch. I’ll wait until later.”

·“It’s just after lunch; they just got back and have to return calls and respond to emails.”

·“It’s summer, I’ll get to them right after Labor Day.”

Can you see the pattern here? Have you said or thought these same things? Have you heard your colleagues use the same dialogue? How about from your boss or sales manager?

Yielder is the number one type of call reluctance in the United States. We are a nation of yielders. But doesn’t it feel right? Doesn’t it feel like we’re describing a terrific quality that we can aspire to?

The key characteristic of a yielder is that they do not want to be perceived as being pushy or intrusive. We see this in behaviors like not asking for the order, not asking for a referral, not asking for additional needed information, etc. And the Yielder loses out to their competitor who is less of a Yielder.

OVER-PREPARER™

This is the number one type of call reluctance of your author. Upon learning that I was an over-preparer, I thought “what a wonderful quality.”That is, until I realized that my production level was being significantly hampered by my need to over-prepare.

An example may help:When prospecting for large commercial clients, I would obtain a few of years of annual reports, 10K’s, product brochures, (we didn’t have the web at the time) but if we did, I would have gotten on the web to do more research and fill up my paper and electronic files with useful (and useless) information. The only problem is that by then it was 6:15 p.m. and I haven’t made that outbound contact. But I’m getting ready! That’s what we over-preparers do – we get ready. By the way, another obvious result of over-preparing is that this behavior will directly feed Goal Diffusion (see last month’s Sales Coach Newsletter topic).

What triggers this behavior?

The trigger is fear. Fear that the prospect may ask me a question that I won’t know the answer to and then I’ll be found out for the loser I am and live under a bridge and never to be able to sell again and blah!, blah!, blah! (No wonder I over-prepare!).

Where did this behavior originate? From my first boss in the business. If you can picture this – I’m maybe 25 years old and all I have is an insurance producers license for the State of New York. My boss was a very good guy and I’m walking out the door to meet with a prospect and he says to me: “Tom, have you thought of everything?” And my response was, “I’ve thought of nothing. His name is Jack, he’s on the fifth floor and he buys insurance, not from us. What else do I need to know?”

Due to the need to keep my job, I immediately adjusted my sales approach and became deeply committed to research and thinking of everything. There was the creation of an internal need to verify information that ultimately was not always relevant, necessary or supportive to simply making an outbound contact.

Get this, I got so good at research that I got promoted and now had sales people working for me. So what do you think I’m saying to them? “Have you thought of everything? Are you prepared?”

The result is that today, right at this moment, there are hundreds of sales women and men across the country over-preparing because they hung out with me. I’m a carrier of Over-Preparation Call Reluctance. I have “toxic” levels of this. All triggered by what I was taught and the positive payoff of promotions and higher earnings. However, Over-Preparation cost me and others a bundle. I was researching instead of promoting.

Do you see a pattern of Yielder and Over-preparation in your office? With your colleagues? With your boss? With your customers?

Now you have names for these “qualities gone bad”. See if you can catch yourself Yielding or Over-Preparing (or both).

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