Keith Goodrum

10 seconds is all you need to overcome the fear of failure. That is what a sales manager told me once. At the time I was afraid of making phone calls to customers. I could pick-up the phone and dial, but when someone said hello.. I would freeze, and hang up. I use to be so happy when a call would go to voicemail. I would leave a message and not have to talk to anyone.

One day my sales manager asked me why was I not making follow-up phone calls? My answer was that I was afraid of failing. He sat me down and told me all I have to do was dial the number, wait for someone to answer, and then only decide to talk to them for 10 seconds. That’s it! If after 10 seconds I was still fearful I could make up some excuse to get off the phone and hang up.

I figured I could do that… and it worked! I found that after 10 seconds I was no longer afraid. Well, I started making appointments. Which led to more sales. And within a few months I was one of the top salesmen.

I quickly found out 2 things.

First people started asking me how did I become such a good salesman so fast. Fast! I had been beating my head against a wall for months trying to become a better salesman. I was at the bottom or middle of the pack for long stretches of time. I would hardly say it was fast

Second that there were few if any other salesmen were doing the things I was doing. Hardly anyone was making follow-up phone calls, or setting appointments. So, few people were making consistent follow-up phone calls that many times I was the only one calling the customer. And that alone led to more sales, because I had no competition. It was easy.

So my question to you is… Why are you worried about failing? Most people are holding back afraid to fail. They believe they need to wait until they are good before they try. Well can’t get good until you practice. And that means failing, but don’t worry it really won’t matter. You will find there is hardly any competition. So, if you do fall down you will still get better results than if you tried nothing.

I’ve stuck my neck out there and have fallen down… several times. And I got up dusted myself off, and tried again. I started several offline businesses until I found one that stuck. Even after I got one running successfully… I made some mistakes that put the company on life support for a while. It was scary for a time but I made adjustments and recovered.

So, you need to grab the entrepreneurial spirit and start making bold moves. Get out there and fall down on your face. You will find out that nobody notices… not even your mom! However what will happen is you will figure out what works, what doesn’t and make adjustments. The important part is to try again, and again, and again. That will lead to success… And then people will start to notice. They will notice that you are a 2%er, and want to know how you did it. Jonathan Fields talks about this on his blog Awake At The Wheel in his post The dirty little secret to success.

Go run out and fall down somewhere, but do it fast!

Keith

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