Busy Doing Nothing

If you are an entrepreneur, you are a salesperson. Period. Full stop. How does that feel? If you object, we might need to iron your brain out a little bit.

You see, if you are to build a successful business, you must get attention. Lots and lots of attention. On this point, sales trainer Grant Cardone is spot on. Here is an image I took from Cardone's website:

This is where a lot of people fall down. The reasons people fail to get the necessary attention are numerous. Some people do not know how to get attention. Others do not like the idea that they will be judged. While some do not like interrupting people. It is this last reason I wish to focus on in this post.

Let me make an important and unequivocal statement. When you aim to get people's attention you will always be interrupting. Always. That statement is a tautology.

The first job of a salesperson is prospecting. Prospecting is simply the act of searching for something of value. In the case of an entrepreneur, prospecting means searching for customers and distributors.

Recently, Jeb Blount wrote a book titled Fanatical Prospecting. In the book Blount agrees with me. He says that we must always be interrupting people. Let us expound upon the idea.

One way to get attention is with the cold call. For various reasons, a lot people would sooner die than make a cold call. Many do. And, while I do not agree with everything Grant Cardone teaches, one point we definitely do agree on is the value and importance of making cold calls.

Back to my tautological statement. Whenever you endeavor to get a person's attention you will be interrupting that person. To put it in different terms, nobody is sitting around doing nothing.

Think about it. I can think of a great activity which is meant to do nothing. That activity is meditating. However, even people who are meditating are not doing nothing. What are they doing? They are meditating!

As you might be able to tell, I have spent some time thinking about this concept. Can you think of a person who is doing absolutely nothing? It is harder than you might think.

A person who is "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" would appear to be doing nothing. But, what would they say they are doing. They are watching television, of course.

The best example I could come up with, of a person who is busy doing nothing, is the image of a person sitting on their front porch, sipping on a cold glass of iced tea. Now, is that person doing nothing? No! S/he would tell you that s/he is relaxing!

The irony of the whole thing is, what do most people say when you ask what they are doing. “Nothing,” right? It is so funny.

Fun and games aside, it really is true that everyone is always doing something. So, whenever you try to get a person's attention you are necessarily interrupting that person.

And, here we run into a big problem. Most of us were raised to believe that it is rude to interrupt people. That belief is not necessarily true, but we have all been taught it. The problem occurs if we take the lesson too literally.

The fact of the matter is that sometimes it is completely appropriate to interrupt a person. Let us come up with an example. Imagine that a couple of neighbors are chatting it up on one of their driveways. The conversation gets pretty interesting and they lose track of their small children.

Now let us imagine you come walking by and notice that the child has gotten into imminent danger. To take an extreme example, the child is playing with some downed power lines. I do not know if that ever really happens but I want to drive the point home.

What would you do? Would you not interrupt the parent's conversation to ask if that is their child? Of course you would! And, would the parents be upset with the fact that you interrupted? Quite the contrary, it is much more likely that they would thank you for the interruption.

The fact of the matter is, it is completely appropriate to interrupt people. The key is to have something of great value to say. In sales we speak of the importance of relevance. What we have to say is valuable if it is relevant to the prospect's life.

In fact, the company MarketingSherpa found that 92 percent of B2B buyers are open to cold calls if the salesperson is relevant. I think this finding is not too surprising. But, it is nonetheless important and it bears repeating.

I am always amazed at the number of people who flat out refuse to make a cold call. It is sad, really. As I have mentioned, one of the main problems is a fear of interrupting people. And, I hope this blog has done at least something to help allay that irrational fear.

It is important that we all learn how to make a cold call. Because, as Grant Cardone would say, “Strangers have everything you want.” It is a cute little statement. It is easy to remember and it drives home the point.

Personally, I prefer the way sales trainer Mike Bosworth puts it. Bosworth says we need to be searching for latent pain. This is especially true of entrepreneurs. True entrepreneurs solve new problems, or fix existing problems in new ways. Either way you will need to get attention. You will need to interrupt people.