I recently finished a gig calling alumni from Oriel college, Oxford as part of a phone campaign from the Development Office. The purpose of the campaign was to improve affinity and convince alumni to donate to the college. About halfway through, I realized I was getting a lot more out of it than I expected I would. I now believe every person should do something like this at least once in their life: you should cold call, sell something door-to-door, or do something that requires you to (1) get rejected a lot, (2) make friends with total strangers in a short period of time, (3) ask for something from someone you don’t know well.

The point of this post is to share some of my lasting impressions. Here’s a list of 5 of them. After the list, I’ll elaborate on each item one-by-one:

  • Energetic positivity is a frame of mind that can be brought about deliberately.
  • Patient communication leads to smooth confidence which leads to trust.
  • People can detect a presence of genuine attentiveness. Conversely, they can tell when you’re not paying attention.
  • Every person is enjoyable and interesting once they break out of their shell—it’s your job to get them to show that.
  • People feel much more comfortable sharing things about themselves if you share things about yourself.

Energetic Positivity

Regardless of my demeanor, every day I was forced to call and consequently every day I was forced to find ways to get excited. I needed to get excited because the quality of my calls would be much better if I had the energy to make them good. I also saw that if I was positive, the person I talked to would be more positive, and this would drastically improve my chances of enjoying the call.

A consequence of this self-propelled positivity was an improvement in my general attitude. Though at first my efforts to make things positive could seem synthetic, they would often mature into a general feeling of optimism that improved the rest of my day. On walks to the call room, I would take negative things and try to rephrase them positively: for example, I’d replace the thought of “that river is dirty” when walking over Magdalen bridge with “we could make that river much cleaner.” By the end of the 15 minute walk my outlook would completely change.

The big realization was that energetic positivity is not something that’s granted by the day. It’s something that can be brought about with a little bit of effort.

Smooth Confidence

I considered a call to go well if I felt happy with the conversation and the callee donated. Both the conversation and probability of donation improved dramatically with smoothness of communication.

Evidently, an ability to speak effectively, expressively, and confidently is tremendously important and I plan to make a sincere effort to improve my verbal skills further. A single “like”, “um”, or awkward pause—though seemingly innocuous—had the potential to destroy the trust I had built with a person. There were a few times when I stumbled during the payment phase of the call, and on at least 3 occasions, this caused the callee to either (1) withdraw their donation or (2) revoke their decision to complete the process over the phone.

The most effective way I found to fight these interjections was reducing my speaking pace. I found that if I went slow and formed every phrase deliberately, I was much less likely to trip up. I never had a callee abstain from processing their information over the phone in instances with no trip ups, and on several occasions the alumnus even chose to increase their donation from the initial ask amount.

Attentive Presence

There is a presence associated with genuine attention that people can detect even over the phone. In other words, if you’re not giving your full attention to someone, they’ll notice.

Just as well, people will notice when you do give your full attention. I spoke to two alumni who made me feel like the conversation I was having with them was the most important thing in the world to them. Undoubtedly it wasn’t—both of them were in the upper decile of the most accomplished people I spoke to on the campaign (which I suspect isn’t a coincidence) and had much more important things to do. What struck me was their ability to invest wholeheartedly in the conversation in a way that made me feel important.

By the end of the campaign I felt much more attuned to people’s interest. More importantly I felt other people being attuned to my interest. If my attention was elsewhere, it quickly became apparent through a deflation of the conversation and an overall decay of presence.

Breaking Shells

I would frequently begin conversations with dull platitudes, themselves holding no substance. Their purpose was to build momentum in the conversation to get to a baseline level of trust where the callee would feel comfortable sharing some of their more interesting qualities and experiences. It’s like poking around a field until something interesting crops up. Something that I found is that every person had something interesting about them once I found a chord. The most effective technique I found for doing that is the subject of the next point (on sharing).

Sometimes it would take several minutes to find something worth talking about, and some people made it much easier than others. There were some calls where I sat through nearly 10 minutes of prodding before any flames caught and others where the subject was interesting after the first question. In any case, a genuine belief in the existence of an interesting core beneath potentially several layers of dense insulation kept me motivated to keep talking.

There are really two assumptions here: (1) every person is interesting if you really reach them, (2) it’s my job to realize that truth. The first point helped me survive the nastiness of some people in the early stages of the conversation, and the second is a gentle reminder that people aren’t going to open up to you on their own. If you want to reach someone, you have to put in effort.

Sharing

I’ve found the most reliable technique of getting people to share things about themselves is to share things about myself. I think there are two things contributing to the success of this approach: (1) sharing things about yourself demonstrates trust and creates a pattern of volunteering information, (2) there are often subjects to latch onto in personal stories.

By the end of the phone campaign, I would progress most of my conversations by relating something the person said to a personal experience by telling a (short) story and then just waiting. I didn’t ask any questions or anything, I would just share my story and sit there. More often than not, the person would respond with a story of their own and go in a completely unexpected direction. No question I would have asked would have led the conversation to that point, but it would go there naturally.

Sometimes the person wouldn’t latch onto my stories and that was fine. It indicates a good time to ask a question and push the conversation elsewhere. Even in this case the voluntary information was valuable because it added a personal element to the talk that defused some of the strangeness of talking on the phone with someone you’ve never met.

In Sum

These were some of my personal impressions from an experience cold calling. What I didn’t talk about is the character that comes with listening to 56 voicemails in a row in over 2 hours of calling or the humility that comes with asking strangers for money. Those things are important and are the part of the reason I think everyone should try something like this at some point. However, the main learning was that people can be really interesting, and I felt that this experience made me better at having good conversations with people I don’t yet know.