A job hunter has a great deal in common with a sales person. Both sell a product. Both have promotional literature. Both make sales presentations. Both use telemarketing to uncover prospects, and that's the hardest part of both their jobs. Why? Phone Phobia.
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According to Denise Roberts of D.A. Roberts & Associates (www.painlessprospecting.com), a telemarketing & customer-service training group, prospecting can be painless. Roberts has learned from experience. She started her first sales call crying in a stairwell, as she was about to do a cold-call canvass of a multi-tenant building.
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Roberts believes that removing the pain from prospecting starts by understanding what causes it. She's identified five pain producers, all of which revolve around the mindset of the caller. That mindset is built on the fears of being viewed as pushy and intrusive. The cures are included, too.
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1. Believing every target is a prospect.
For job hunters, this is particularly true. Salespeople know that NO is heard more often than YES; statistics show that a salesperson calls on a customer about ten times before making a sale. Coping with rejection is part of their job. They don't take it personally.

Job hunters tend to take rejection personally because the product is personal, NO also means their job search must continue.

The Cure...Qualify the prospect and the company before you make the call. Make sure your target is a decision maker. Call the human resources department to find out if the firm is hiring. If not, you can make a networking-only call to your target.
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2. Trying to sell your product or book an appointment before establishing the products value.
The hard-sell, full frontal assault doesn't work. Did you feel uncomfortable the last time that a high-pressure salesperson confronted you? You bet. It was a confrontation, not a conversation. The last thing a job hunter wants to do is to make a networking contact/prospective employer/source of referral feel uncomfortable.

The Cure...Start your conversation with soft-sell: "(first name, I'm hoping that you can take a few minutes to steer me in the right direction?, and continue with "I know you have a number of contacts that may be able to use a person with my talent." This approach doesn't put the target in the I'm-not-hiring mode because you're asking for advice, not a job.
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3. Booking weak appointments.
Job hunters believe that any appointment is better than no appointment. They often use the "could I stop by" or "I'll be in the neighborhood" approaches when asking for a face-to-face. For the target, these create the perception of pleading--they hear, "please, please meet with me."

The Cure...Ask for a meeting positively, yet flexibly. Use "I've got my planner open, what's the best time to sit down for 15 minutes to continue our discussion? Is early in the week better than late?"
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4. Tells vs. Asks.
The more you talk about yourself, the less time you have to learn about the needs of your prospect. A tell message indicates that you, who "intruded" into their schedule, are more important than they are. Bad message to send. Roberts says, "If you tell, they resist. If you ask, they assist."

The Cure...Have a formula of open-ended questions prepared. These develop to conversation. One good question is: "Besides job knowledge, what do you look for when hiring someone?" Ask, then listen, think, then respond is the formula.
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5. Confusing activity with productivity.
Roberts calls this creative avoidance. Finding stuff to do before you make the calls that have to be made only postpones the inevitable. This makes a difficult task harder because you've created a huge backlog.

The Cure...Use your planner to schedule a block of five calls in the morning and five in the afternoon on Mon.-Wed.-Fri. Use Tues. and Thurs. for follow-up calls. The calls are part of each day's schedule.
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TAKE THE CURES...THEY WORK
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