Sales Call Reluctance affects many sales reps in all kinds of businesses. It’s a problem that is defined mostly as a psychological issue that prevents sales reps from making enough calls. I’ve read in a few places that there are as many as twelve types of call reluctance. I am always a fan of naming things in order to get control of them. I was excited when I came across this thing called “Sales Call Reluctance.” I was hoping it would hold the answer to a problem everyone has experienced. Because I believe we’ve all hesitated. We’ve all procrastinated. We’ve all not made a call that we should have made.

The fact that someone has given this problem a name and endeavored to develop some techniques for combating it is great news. When an obstacle has a name, it’s easier to recognize. When it’s easier to recognize it’s harder to be surprised by it, or controlled by it.

The thing is, though, delving into this complex topic seems to require a willingness to dive pretty deep into sales psychology. Psychology is all fine and good, and sometimes yields insights that can save people huge amounts of time and effort when they look deep into the mirror and learn how to focus on succeeding and removing the barriers to success that may have been persisting.

But if I remember psychology class from school, there is a thing called behavioral psychology which focuses less on delving deep into the mind to identify the root causes of one’s woes and focuses more on changing ones behavior. If you act better, you’ll feel better. If you build it, they will come. So here comes a little piece of technology that can help the salesperson afflicted by sales call reluctance change their behavior. In this case, the behavioral change that is sought is to spend less time hesitating and more time making calls.

Using lead management software with a lead dialer can automate the placing of calls in such a way that the salesperson does spend more time on the phone. Some lead dialers leverage business intelligence to automatically call leads in order of importance. Calling through a list of leads that has been automatically arranged in order of importance enables a salesperson to click through calls without spending undue time searching through leads to identify opportunities.

This way of working benefits the salesperson suffering from call reluctance particularly. This is because it is in those moments, when he or she shifts out of selling mode and into administrative mode that the call reluctance begins to take hold. The longer the salesperson spends deliberating over which lead to call next, the harder it becomes to make any call at all. Staying in selling mode, by clicking through calls with an intelligent dialer helps keep sales reluctance at bay, and keeps contact, qualification, and close rates high.

Tags: Lead Management