Sales Call Anxiety Research

Recently stumbled upon an excellent paper by Belschak, Verberke and Bagozzi (2008) talking about SCA (Sales Call Anxiety - not reluctance). After 10 years in sales and management I still get the butterflies sometimes. The article is called Coping with sales call anxiety: The role of sale perseverance and task concentration strategies. It's behind a paywall so I'll summarize.

The authors statistically test 2 approaches to solving SCA: Task focus (ignoring thoughts, focusing on the dial and the next move) and curiously, "sales perseverance", or persistence in the call ("closing" and objection handling, keeping the prospect on the phone as long as possible).

The authors find that Task focus is great at handling negative cognitions (I can't do this, they aren't interested, his tone is bad) but horrible at handling physiological reactions and general anxiety.

In contrast, sales perseverance is great at handling physiological reactions but not cognitions. There is some mental mechanism that records even failed calls where the salesperson persists as "wins".

This research suggests that the vogue "just make the call" approach is great at winning half the battle, but the other half is won by a concept that is absolutely not in vogue today in selling - being "pushy" during prospecting calls.

Neil Rackham disproved the efficacy of "closes" in high ticket sales in SPIN Selling. Today, objection handling is hardly drilled in many SaaS offices.

This research suggests that the point of persistence is not "for the sale" but "for the salesman", and that it's the quickest approach to getting new hires over the curve of prospecting anxiety.

It also concludes that people who have desensitized themselves to prospecting have done this accidentally. This is probably the root of the belief that some people just "aren't cut out" for sales - there's an "unspoken" formula that gets you over the hurdle of rejection sensitivity.

The authors collab'd on a bunch of other studies that I look forward to reading too.

What do you guys think? Have you accidentally used this in your career?