Esoteric Tips for Cold Calling Success - The Power of NLP (Part 1)

Tap into The Five Senses For Effortless Cold Calling

Intro

Many of the actionables we share in the GTM Operator’s Club are larger strategic pivots involving investing significant time, resources or effort into implementation.

Unless you’re a mercenary AKA individual operator/agency owner, things like list strategy, scripting and sales enablement often run through a mile-long bureaucracy of presentations, committees, approval processes and other assorted snooze fests.

Such change management can and does take considerable education, patience and persistence, leading to the obvious question: What ought the individual contributor seeking to maximize their outcomes do while this is ongoing?

It’s to answer this very question that the Esoteric Tips for Cold Calling Success series was born. All of the suggestions in these articles will have the following traits:

• Speed to value - applying these tips will get you performance lift immediately

• Low capital investment - It will cost you either nothing or very, very little to apply these suggestions

• No bureaucratic red tape to cut through - most importantly, these are all suggestions you can implement without having to seek anybody’s approval

For the individual contributor that may be fighting for these changes with other stakeholders in their organization, it can be disheartening to feel like your success is in the hands of others, and since we here at the GTM Operator’s Club are about individual agency, we felt it vital to equip our readers with things they could do

The esoteric tips series is about things that are fully within your control - none of the things listed here will require significant capital or time investments, nor will they require permission or approval from anybody (besides yourself).

A Warning: The only pre-requisites to getting value out of today’s exercise are an open mind and perseverance. Some of these tips are going to feel a little “out there”/”woo-woo”. Trust the process and know that, like a muscle, your ability to tap into your imagination and affect reality will occur in proportion to your diligence in attempting to do so.

The Power of NLP

When I tell you to think of the smell of popcorn, what’s the first thing you associate with that?

For many people, it’s probably “the movies”, or some variation thereof.

What about sunscreen?

Usually the beach, summer, maybe family vacations etc.

Pumpkins, apple pie?

Starbucks and other companies have tapped fully into this trend, commercializing fall successfully as a result.

We all know instinctively that certain scents are cross-associated with memories, which in turn are cross-associated with feelings.

But how many of us associate a smell with cold calling success?

This one’s straight from Jordan Belfort’s “Way Of The Wolf”, and borrows heavily from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).

NLP is an approach to understanding how our thoughts, language, and experiences shape our behaviors and interactions by focusing on how we perceive the world through the five senses - sight (visual), hearing (auditory), touch (kinesthetic), smell (olfactory ), and taste (gustatory) - these senses create our internal "maps" of reality, and by paying attention to these sensory inputs and recognizing how they shape thoughts and emotions. Awareness of these inputs allows you to consciously use language and perception to influence behavior, enhance communication, and achieve desired outcomes. Techniques like reframing beliefs, using language that aligns with someone's dominant sensory preferences, and visualizing success are all part of how NLP leverages the senses to create positive changes.

The long and short of it is this: Our brain associates the five senses with feelings - whether we realize it or not - the conclusion, then, is that it’s better to do this on purpose and take charge of those associations than letting them occur passively.

I picked this one up when I was in high ticket sales and had back to back sales calls, sometimes for 8 hours straight. When you have 30 minutes to run discovery, pitch and close, it’s imperative to be able to get into the zone quickly, and this strategy became vital for me.

What every “high-ticket closer” thinks they look like

Athletes have long been hip to the powers of visualization. Kobe Bryant would visualize entire games before stepping onto the court - rehearsing specific plays, how he would move, where his opponents would be, and contingency planning for challenges that could come up. Mental rehearsal allowed him to feel like he had "already been there" when those moments arrived - because in his mind he already had.

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The Exercise:

Here’s a step by step on how you can do the same:

1. Order a Boom Boom Stick - Pick a scent that you think you’re going to like and then put it on your desk the next time you’re calling - DO NOT smell it yet

2. The next time you book a meeting, close your eyes and really focus on how your body feels success. Drop the meeting recording in your company Slack channel to invite positive reinforcement of achieving your desired outcome, and be mindful of the bodily sensations and the dopaminergic release that come with that.

3. Magnify the intensity of these feelings by tapping into the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch).

   1. Close your eyes and place yourself in front of an old school control board with a knob labeled SUCCESS. Feel your hand grab the dial and hear it click as you rotate it to “11” - bring the color and definition of the picture up with each click, until the entire picture is buzzing with energy and over-saturated in color

   2. Once the knob hits 11 - teleport yourself Back To The Future style into the audience of a major award show and hear your name called to accept the biggest award of the evening. Stand up and feel the firm handshakes of your greatest mentors and inspirations. Hear them congratulate you and walk up to the stage as an audience stretching further than the eye can see stands in rapturous applause. See a massive gold phone statue on the stage and read the inscription with your name and “WORLD’S GREATEST COLD CALLER”. NOW pick up the Boom Boom Stick and take a big inhale - tying that scent to the feelings from the scene I just described.

4. Repeat steps 2-3 at least half a dozen times to “anchor” the association

5. Now, when you’re cold calling, if you need an extra boost, pick up the Boom Boom Stick and smell it. By virtue of the anchoring exercise we repeated in the prior steps, you will associate the scent with successful cold calling, and as a byproduct evoke the mental state you feel when you succeed. By putting yourself in the state of success, you create a positive flywheel and a self fulfilling prophesy.

NOTE: To be abundantly clear, the scene I just described does not have to be exactly what you picture - the key is simply to visualize conditions that magnify the feeling of success and accomplishment FOR YOU and then creating an anchor to that feeling via the Boom Boom Stick. If you find the visualization exercise difficult, an alternative some find easier is to time travel BACK to a time in your life where you felt accomplished and successful - maybe it was getting recognized for something in school or at work, winning a big sporting game or even getting praise from somebody important to you. We personally like coming up with novel situations because it trains your ability to visualize abstraction - which will come in handy for next week’s esoteric tip - but if this is difficult you can still reap the benefits and then progress.

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CONCLUSION

"We become what we think about."
— Earl Nightingale, The Strangest Secret

It’s popular these days to see sales leaders and reps alike whine how outbound “is hard” and then citing a panoply of reasons as to why this might be. To counteract this constant deluge of negativity, it’s absolutely vital to have mental exercises that amplify the artifacts of success you already have so as to be able to draw upon them at will - in the process creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of success.

Your visualization and manifestation powers, like a muscle, will grow in proportion to their use, and the exercise we’ve conducted today will serve as a powerful baseline for the other esoteric tactics we will discuss in the upcoming weeks.

Until next Tuesday, be well, and if you’re feeling extra ambitious read through of Wallace D. Wattles’ The Science Of Getting Rich and Earl Nightingale’s The Strangest Secret. Alternatively or in conjunction, listen to the tapes on repeat as you go about your day to day life:

Rooting for you always,
Charles