“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and common sense.” ~Buddha
The old cliché, “I say tomayto, you say tomahto,” has been popping up in my head recently, mainly because of a lesson I recently learned after years of trial and error.
For the last several years, I have been closely listening to and reading the advice of “experts” on subjects related to life, love, business, and the pursuit of happiness. I have come to an astonishing (for me, anyway) conclusion: Everybody is right, and everybody is wrong.
Confused? Allow me to explain with an example.
About 18 months ago, I changed careers from newspaper journalism to insurance sales. When I first started in the insurance industry, my boss told me that to be successful I would have to not let “no” bother me. Just keep trucking, let that rejection roll like water off a duck’s back, he would say.
He also told me persistence was a major key to selling life insurance. Keep calling clients, even if they blow you off a few (or in one case, many) times.
His advice worked with one client. I literally called her a dozen or more times. She bought insurance, and then canceled.
I scheduled a follow-up appointment to find her some more affordable insurance. She canceled. Another follow-up appointment scheduled. Another canceled. This literally went on for three months.
Finally, we were able to get the insurance she was looking for at a price she could afford.
After writing that application, my boss (let’s call him Jay) said, “Let this be a lesson on the power of persistence.”
A few weeks later, my boss’s boss (let’s call him Brent) gave me some very different advice: “Never call a potential client more than five or six times. It makes you look desperate.”
I have learned that, in many cases, this advice is also true. Calling too many times will certainly not work on a lot of clients. But, in the above-mentioned example, it did work.
So, I asked myself, “Whose advice is right, and whose is wrong?” (more…)