The phone is a common source of anxiety for salespeople.  Whether making cold calls, warm calls, or just following up with existing clients, being on the phone can be stressful.  From setting up sales appointments to making sales over the phone, it is also one of the most important part of the sales process.  This also means that the phone is where most rejection happens, and therefore it’s easy to want to avoid it.  Most salespeople are looking for ways to improve, not only their skill on the phone, but their level of enthusiasm for making calls.

A simple tool to both improve results on the phone and make it less stressful is to track the results of your phone calls.  Most salespeople have an anecdotal relationship to making phone calls.  That means that they think in terms of stories.  They have a narrative about how their phone time went the last time they made calls, and about their skill on the phone in general.  What happens is that small pieces of their experience (possibly a really mean customer or a bad result) expand in their story, way out of proportion to the actual phone activity, you can deflate the power of the negative stories and also find where you can improve your business results.

All it takes to track phone calls is a piece of paper in front of you when you make phone calls.  Put the date and time you are making phone calls on the top.  Put a row of hashmarks on the first line – one for each call you make.  Underneath the first row of marks, put a second hashmark if you talk to the person you were calling (voice mail or messages don’t count).  And you can put a third row of hashmarks that indicate success – an appointment or a sale, for example. 

There are a lot of ways that you can modify this basic system, and you can capture a lot of different types of information.  Remember, though, the simpler it is, the more likely you’ll use it.  And by tracking this information, you’ll have a snapshot of how your calls went – not how you feel they went.  If you keep these call tallies you can even build up a solid body of data about how your calls go over time.  This lets you find out the most efficient times to call, or you can see the effects of a different phone approach.  You’ll know how many calls you made exactly, and how many people were there (no more saying “no one was available". 

There is an old sales adage that says “performance measured is performance improved”.  Tracking your telephone activity will allow you to take away the fear and replace it with evidence – which will make your calls that much easier and that much more effective.