Hey everybody, it’s Richard Milligan here with recruiting conversations, I’m back and I’m fresh off a recruiting conversation, imagine that like I get to use the recruiting conversation in every aspect of my business, like earlier today, I was talking to someone about a specific moment they have with the recruit over the phone and I said I brought up with the terminology recruiting conversations. Like it’s so brilliant right it’s just brilliant and and I came up with it, so you know if I say it’s brilliant maybe a little egotistical but if you think it’s brilliant, shoot me a line it’s not egotistical. I need somebody else to think that recruiting conversations the podcast is brilliant, and if somebody else does then I can get off the hook we’re calling it brilliant, right? I don’t know if it works that way or not, but I’m just in a fun mood it’s Monday, I’m coming off of a knee surgery last Tuesday, I’m just glad to be back in the office and in my studio here recording a podcast after having had some conversations with recruiting leaders like yourself. And so, I am a fresh off a conversation, I’m jumping straight into a podcast, pass that conversation because I’m realizing this has come up multiple times today with recruiting leaders that I’m coaching, so I know that a lot of you are struggling with this one idea, this one topic, and so we’re just going to address it. So without any further to do it revolves around call trepidation or cold call reluctancy is what with most of us know of by. But it is that moment where you want to move towards something but you can’t because of this element or aspect of fear that is going on inside you. Now look as a recruiting leader there were different places and times where this would insert itself. It wouldn’t always insert itself, but it seemed as though when I was at my weakest this was where it was strongest but when I was at my strongest there was no sign of it. And so if you’re going through a difficult season, maybe you just lost a couple of people on your team and now you’ve got to rebuild and you’ve lost some confidence, perfect place for cold call reluctancy to insert itself. And so were you lack confidence, in this rears its head you need a way to solve the problem, right? And this is a problem to be solved. I I’ve actually had leaders that have left the recruiting leadership role because they couldn’t get over cold call reluctancy. So this is how devastating this can be to someone’s career, have an inability to move towards the phone or to move towards a conversation with someone and that and the phone is changing, right? It’s not now, a lot of times it’s not the phone, but maybe you know creating a conversation through a video text or through a video message on LinkedIn, through a video message on Facebook. You may struggle moving toward something because of fear of rejection, and so I’m gonna give you a couple of tools in your toolbox to go at this.
So first and foremost here’s what I found is that there is a narrative here, that when we confuse the narrative, it causes us to be fearful, and so I’ll give you an example, I’ve got a couple of speaking engagements over the next seven, eight days and as well as I know my material, look I coach eight to ten hours a day, I know my material, I know my philosophy my beliefs around recruiting, right? So when I get on stage it’s not a question of knowing my material, but when I get on stage, I’ll have some, I’ll have some heart palpitations going on, like my energy will be going really high and I could psych it in that moment say oh goodness I’m fearful, I’m not sure if I can do this and I could create that narrative, or I could change the narrative and the narrative could be I’m excited I’m energized with the idea of sharing what I know about recruiting. Either way it’s my choice with narrative is, I get to choose the narrative. So I’m very careful as my heart begins to speed up, to not allow my brain to actually take over the process, and to move me towards fear because fear can paralyze me, right? That’s why public speaking they say most people would rather jump out of a plane and skydive than actually public speak, because they’re so fearful of it, right? There’s a narrative there am I excited or am I fearful? You control the narrative now as a as a believer one of the things that I look at Scripture and in the Bible it says this it says that “we are to capture our thoughts” well when I think of the word capture, I think that’s a word that is used around bad guys, around terrorists, right? Like we want to capture that individual, to keep them from harming other people, right? We want to capture them, well it’s interesting that that word would be used in the context of our thoughts because if we allow our thoughts just to go do their own thing, they will actually terrorize us, they’ll actually create fear they’ll actually paralyze us from being able to move towards the things that we know we have to move towards, if we’re gonna win as recruiting leaders. So make sure that whatever narrative is being created you’re controlling it, and here’s what I found look I’m a huge believer in personal affirmations and here’s why, your thoughts are silent to the world right? They can run rampant there’s a reason why you know people when they go to bed that can’t turn their brain off stay up all night because the brain will just go and go and go, and it will work out worst case scenario, am I right or am I right? yeah it’ll take that simple phone call it’s you are gonna make to recruit and it will turn it into somebody rejecting you so hardcore that you can’t even move towards recruiting anymore, and somehow the brain has this narrative that it can move towards that.
So, you have to interrupt that thought pattern, by speaking things out loud and therefore personal affirmations are still powerful. Like I can actually have my brain run towards fear and I can outloud affirm myself, personally, and I can cut that off. So that it doesn’t terrorize me, okay? So I’ve got a quarantine, I’ve got to capture that and how you do that is by speaking things that are true, out loud. You can’t actually think a negative thought while speaking a positive thing, try it. It’s like trying to sneeze with your eyes open, you can’t do it. Like in if you can do it, somebody shoot me a message because you’re one of your the eighth wonder of the world, because you just can’t do that you can’t have something running negative and then speak positivity out loud as a personal affirmation, and not do anything other than interrupt it, and reject it. So if you want a good personal affirmation app I use think up, so it’s a really powerful app, you can actually record your affirmations you can set them to music you can set reminders to on your phone to remind you to do them in the morning afternoon or an evening whatever you decide, but I do encourage you to in the minimum write out some personal affirmations and where you begin to have this issue with cold-call reluctancy with this trepidation to actually just pick up the phone and call, begin to speak truth to yourself, because there is, that’s a pathway for you. Now you know direct solicitations only one out of every four recruits right now, but it is an element that you have to have in your game if you’re gonna succeed on the highest level of recruiting. So there’s one part of that, okay the other part of it is this, confidence is a big reason why most people struggle calling. It just is confidence comes from knowing what you’re going to say, confidence comes from having a solid phone script, from already understanding what objections you’re going to get and from being able to confidently overcome those objections. So what I found is that most people to say I’m struggling with this when I say okay let’s go ahead and role play with your phone script, they go I don’t know it that well that means that’s pretty obvious to me why you wouldn’t want to move towards the phone because ultimately if you did you would expose yourself, and you wouldn’t be prepared and you realize we can work the negative pieces out, like if you’re unprepared and someone gives you an objection that you’re not ready for, and you fumble around with that you embarrass yourself, right? So you’ve got to step into your phone script very confidently, what does that mean it means you’re gonna memorize it, frontwards and backwards, you’re not just going to go over this five times or ten times or a hundred times you’re going to go over your phone script probably thousand plus times. In fact, record it and then listen to yourself again and again and again, on the way to work on the way home from work. Your phone scripts important, you like recruiting is all about gaining confidence gleaning confidence and the quickest way to move past a very short season, where you’re experiencing cold call reluctancy is to get really confident and then to go execute a strong phone script and to have some wins.
Look my phone script that I use, is one that gave me 30 to 40% appointment rate, so 3 to 4 out of every 10 people I would speak to would actually schedule an appointment with me. Hey I’ll give it to you here now here’s my phone script right I did a bunch of research on you and in my research I see some similarities in our core values, and because of that I want to reach out and introduce myself, okay? Now from in the industry that I’m coming that I came out of the mortgage industry, the average tenure in that industry was 2.5 years, ok? So I would on the end of that script, I would say understanding that people in our industry transition on average every two and a half years and because of that if you were to transition, I realize that you have a group of leaders that you trust that you have relationship with that you’d pick up the phone and call, and I want you to be able to pick up the phone and say hey Richard because you and I have a relationship, so if you’re willing to meet with me next Thursday because my calendar is open, then I promise not to recruit you, and I promise not to talk about my company value proposition, what do you say? So that was my phone strip and I would get three to four people of every ten that would say yes to that, now several things high integrity, integrity matters, okay so high integrity says if I’m gonna say I did a bunch of research on you and in my research, I’ve seen I see some similarities between your core values and my core values, that better be true, because they will challenge you in that space, really what did they’ll ask you the question, what did you find out about me? you better be able to answer that if you can’t answer that, then you don’t have any business and using my phone script, okay? So if you can answer that, and you can answer what core values that you saw, and look with Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, snapchat, or you can just a regular good old-fashioned Google search in most industries you can identify where they are, and who they are, and maybe a couple of other platforms and the mortgage industry could go to Yelp or activerain or just a number of other sites where I could get more information. I can piece together a picture of who you are. So the game has changed, as it comes to recruiting people because I don’t have to really truly cold call people anymore, I can actually warm that up, by having a lot of information about you, before I actually call you. So identify what those tools are that you can actually incorporate into your research, do your research, and you can use that phone script and it works extremely well, okay? And if you know that, and you know what objections you’re gonna get, right? I’m happy where I’m, at I’m not interested, I don’t have time to talk, those tend to be the top three that you’re gonna get, how are you going to overcome those? And if you know, like what I would teach is, I don’t address them, I acknowledge them, that’s right addressing them is kind of wallowing around in that, oh I’ve heard great things about your company and I didn’t think that you’d be happy to, that you wouldn’t be interested and you know I may I’m addressing it, I’m giving them giving them more ammunition to support that, I’m just simply gonna acknowledge it and acknowledging it, says look I appreciate the fact that you’re happy where you are, so let me be real direct, I appreciate the fact that you’re busy right now so let me be real direct, I understand that you’re not interested so let me be real direct, I don’t care what objection you give me I can use that to overcome most things that you give me I had a young lady that once told me she said that her the objection she gave people that no one had ever over overcame to the to the date, was out of respect for you and honouring your time, I’m gonna decline, right? I could say, well I appreciate the fact that you want to respect and honor my time, so let me be real direct, and I can move into the remaining part of my phone script, right? So you can handle most things through that narrative, and in the end, as a recruiting leader you’re someone who’s fishing in a smaller pond, so you don’t have full on permission to keep throwing the right bomb and trying to overcome objections and upsetting people. Corporate recruiters get more leeway even though I don’t encourage your corporate recruiters to do this, but you know if the corporate recruiter wants to do that they’ve got a thousand other markets that they can go, no a thousand other ponds that they can go fish in, right? You don’t. So you have to stand on the framework of your attractive leadership, so where someone gives me a strong objection, and I’m not able to you know move beyond that, then I’m going to make sure I walk away from that phone conversation with a good next step, and so I would say something along the lines of, look out just to say thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day, to spend it on the phone with me, I would love to text message you a copy of a book that I read recently, through audible, what’s a good number is this number here your cell phone number, that I can text it to, and now you’ve created a next step.
Now I can engage them a different conversation, okay? So, confidence is a big deal, right? that just simply means you’re going to know your script frontwards and backwards, all of your objections frontwards and backwards, and then the other part of this is, we’re going to intercept the narrative that our brains trying to create, which our brain is trying to incite fear, trying to undermine our confidence, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to take a complete different narrative with that to say, this is energy and excitement that’s moving me towards this not moving me away from this. So, if you are struggling with cold call reluctancy, know that you’re not alone, this is something I address in my coaching over and over and over again, there’s another five to ten different ways that you can overcome this. I do think that creating accountability, where the person that’s holding you accountable actually has a reward, or when you win they win. I give you a quick example of that but a quick example that, would be as I as a married man out of 20 years, if I told my wife look every week that I make 50 phone calls, then you get to go Saturday and get a massage, or you get to go on Saturday and get your nails done. So every day, I’m asking you to ask me, did you make your 10 calls today? And if I answer “no” then I’m sorry I let you down, you don’t get to go do this thing this weekend, right? So I would I would let myself down, before I would let my wife down that situation. Look I could incorporate my kids and say look if dad does his 10 calls per day over the course the next week, like you guys get to go to a movie on Friday night, and don’t think that my kids wouldn’t be connecting with me every single day to see if dad actually made his phone calls the per for that day, and I would do it for them, before I would do it for me. So there’s other tools in the toolbox here that you can incorporate into this, just make sure that you have these that you’re using them, and you’re solving this problem. Do not let this defeat you, okay the phone is always gonna have an element that you’re gonna have to be able to manage and master, and if you don’t manage a master correctly, it will beat you, okay? So, you got this the phones just some another thing, another tool in the toolbox, we’re gonna get past this we’re gonna use it to our advantage. So with that said pass this on to somebody, look you’re not the only person that experienced the cold call reluctancy in this industry, whatever industry it is that you’re in, pass this on to somebody else, and say hey I came across this and thought I’d share it with you. Everybody deserves to win in this space of recruiting it’s a difficult position being the recruiting leader, so let’s go figure out how we win this is a couple of tools that you can use to do that, and until I talk to you again here on recruiting conversations, wishing you all the best this week, have some fun recruiting, it should be fun, and until we talk to each other again, have a great week everyone.
