If the phone doesn’t ring it’s me.

—Jimmy Buffett

• Question: “What’s the easiest way to get a recruiter to stop working?”
• Answer: “Put a phone in front of them.”

This joke is all too true for thousands of recruiters for whom picking up the phone and calling a prospect is the most stressful part of their day. These reluctant recruiters procrastinate—get ducks in a row, work to ensure that everything is perfect before they dial, default to social media, and secretly hope that the phone will disappear.

They make excuses—and I mean any excuse—to do anything other than call prospects.

They work over their leaders, too. Whining that no one answers the phone anymore. Arguing that calling is a waste of time. Complaining that people don’t like to be contacted by phone.

Last month at a Fanatical Military Recruiting Boot Camp, a First Sergeant grabbed me before the session to thank me for being there. He then complained that the single biggest challenge facing the battalion was getting the recruiters to pick up the phone and call prospects.

His words: “We are having such a hard time getting them to just pick up the phone and talk to people. Most of them waste their days f#@king around on Facebook.”

As soon as I began the module on telephone prospecting, the normal whining began about how teenagers don’t answer the phone. Two recruiters (both egregiously behind on mission) insisted that social media was the only way to communicate with “this new generation.”

I’ve heard it all before and I’m immune to excuses, because I know the truth. Nobody answers a phone that doesn’t ring. Underperforming recruiters are always quick to complain that what they are not doing isn’t working.

We did three live phone blocks that day using the targeted prospecting lists the recruiters had prepared in advance. Over the course of the day, we maintained a 41 percent contact rate—that’s actual live prospects answering their phones—and a 47 percent appointment rate. This was not a statistical anomaly. It was generated by 82 recruiters who made 1,066 outbound dials (attempts).

Everyone was stunned at the results. The same First Sergeant pulled me aside before I left. “I don’t understand how you got those results,” he said. “Everybody tells me that people don’t answer the phone anymore.”

“Who’s telling you that?” I asked.

“The recruiters,” he responded.

“The same people that you say won’t make calls?”

He nodded his head slowly as the weight of this realization sank in.

Nobody Answers a Phone That Doesn’t Ring

The myth that the phone no longer works—because people don’t answer—is disproven during our Fanatical Military Recruiting Boot Camps. Recently during an FMR training session in Georgia, we started phone blocks at 8 a.m. It was June, school was out, and we were calling high school students. When I gave the order—you have 30 minutes to make 30 dials and set two interviews—the hands went up and the grumbling began.

“Jeb, you know it’s way too early to be calling.”

“These kids are all still in bed.”

“No one is going to answer the phone this early!”

“We shouldn’t be calling this early because we’ll be waking people up and upsetting them.”

On and on it went until I cut it off and gave the order again: Thirty minutes, thirty dials, two appointments. Go!

Thirty minutes later, heads were shaking as the First Sergeants reported the numbers. As a group, in just 30 minutes, the recruiters had booked 73 interviews. Yes, we shook a few kids out of bed, but because most of them were sleeping with their phones, we had far more conversations than anyone anticipated. It turns out that no one in the battalion ever made prospecting calls that early in the morning.

The myth that the phone doesn’t work is just that—a myth. The statistics don’t lie. When working with military recruiters, we see between 20 and 50 percent contact rates by phone, depending on the quality of the list used while calling.

This is far higher than response rates with e-mail and social recruiting and provides a much faster path to qualifying the prospects and converting them to face-to-face interviews. Real-world evidence flies directly in the face of the myth, repeated over and over again, that the telephone has a low success rate with teenagers. If you analyze military recruiting data, you’ll find that telephone prospecting generates more appointments than any other prospecting channel.

It gets even better. We are seeing clear trends that contact rates via phone are rising. More prospects are answering their phones because of three trends:

1. Phones are anchored to people. For your prospects, the smartphone is their closest companion. The average prospect looks at their phone every six minutes. They sleep with their phone, eat with their phone, and take it everywhere they go.
2. No one is calling. Because so much communication has shifted to e-mail, social in-boxes, and text, phones are not ringing. Because of this, recruiters who are calling are standing out in the crowd and getting through.
3. Prospects are getting burned out on impersonal spam. E-mail and social in-boxes are being flooded with crap. Prospects are hungry for something different—a live, authentic human being. They want to talk to you.

The Telephone Is, Has Always Been, and Will Continue to Be Your Most Powerful Recruiting Tool

Pay attention! The phone is your most powerful recruiting tool. Period, end of story.

Let me repeat this one more time, slowly, for the people in the back row who aren’t tracking. There is no other tool in recruiting that will deliver better results, fill your funnel faster, and help you cover more ground in less time than the phone.

So, stop looking at it like it’s your enemy! And no, it is not going to dial itself.

Here is the brutal truth: Recruiters who ignore the phone deliver mediocre results, consistently miss mission, and become a weak link.

Sergeant Gilroy wrote me with this question:

“My Gunnery Sergeant is always trying to get me to use the phone for prospecting. I’m terrible on the phone, and I’ve tried to explain to him that I’m much better in person. How can I convince him to just let me get out and talk to people face to face?”

This question is not unusual. When faced with telephone prospecting, many recruiters say, “But I’m way better in person.”

My answer: Of course you are better in person. That is why you need to get out in the community, own your schools, and default to setting face-to-face interviews with qualified prospects and their parents.

But here’s the deal: In recruiting, time is mission, and you can cover far more ground, qualify more prospects, and set more interviews in a focused and targeted one-hour phone block than in an entire day of driving around in your territory looking for face-to-face interactions.

Think about it this way: How many prospects could you reasonably engage and qualify prospecting face to face in an eight-hour period? Even on your busiest day, 20 would be a stretch. In most territories, with travel time, getting into your schools, and catching students in between classes, it would be closer to 10.

How about one hour on the phone, with a list of targeted prospects? How many phone calls could you make? Averaging one to two minutes per call, you could make 25 to 50 calls. So, if you are touching twice as many prospects in about a tenth of the time, in a climate-controlled environment, which do you think will yield better results? The answer is a no-brainer.

Am I saying that face-to-face prospecting, social recruiting, e-mail, or text messaging are bad prospecting channels and should not be used? Of course not. As you’ve already learned, when you balance your prospecting across multiple channels, you give yourself the highest statistical probability of reaching the right prospect, with the right message, at the right time.

What I am saying is that the phone is the most efficient prospecting tool because when you are organized, you can use it to reach more prospects in a shorter period of time than through any other prospecting channel. Because you have many more things to do in your recruiting day than prospect, it is in your best interest to use the most efficient method for contacting lots of prospects—and that’s the phone.

The telephone is also more effective than e-mail, social, and text because actually speaking to another human being gives you a higher probability to make a personal connection and get the prospect in for an interview. Yet many recruiters find it awkward to use the phone for prospecting because they:

• Don’t know what to say, say stupid things, or use awkward, cheesy scripts that generate resistance and rejection.
• Don’t have an easy-to-execute telephone prospecting framework that actually works.
• Don’t know how to deal with reflex responses, brush-offs, and objections.
• Find it uncomfortable and awkward to interrupt invisible strangers.
• Are afraid of rejection.

Nobody Likes It; Get Over It

Staff Sergeant Richmond hit me up with this question:

“Jeb, I need your advice. I know that I should be using the phone more for prospecting. But it’s really difficult for me to make the call. I feel like that kid calling a girl to go to a school dance who gets rattled when her dad answers the phone and forgets what to say. I know it’s all in my head. I’m normally very confident and comfortable talking to people. But when I’m on the phone with a prospect, it’s a different story. How do I overcome this?”

Richmond’s question is honest. It reflects how many recruiters feel about telephone prospecting.

Richmond, like most recruiters, has every intention of getting on the phone and engaging new prospects. But as he reluctantly dials that first number—after wasting prime recruiting time on “research” and “administrative” work in an effort to avoid the inevitable—his palms sweat, his heart pounds, and he secretly prays that no one will answer. Then the prospect or a parent says “Hello,” and he freezes and forgets what to say. He stumbles over his words, stuttering and sputtering. The prospect quickly brushes him off:

• “I’m not interested.”
• “I’m going to college.”
• “I don’t think the military is right for me.”
• “I don’t have time to talk.”
• Click.

He feels rejected and embarrassed, and his motivation for calling evaporates. To avoid making more calls, he shuffles papers and wastes time doing anything but dialing again. He whines that he has no time to call because there is so much admin work to do, and instead of calling, he hangs out on Facebook.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Telephone prospecting is the most despised activity in recruiting. Calling and interrupting people you don’t know is uncomfortable. You get a tremendous amount of rejection.

It will always be uncomfortable to pick up the phone and interrupt strangers. It is just not a natural thing to do. There will always be calls and even days when you fumble your words and become embarrassed. You will always get more rejection than acceptance. Nothing is going to change this. Yet the fact remains that the telephone is, by a wide margin, the most effective weapon in your recruiting arsenal.

What I find across the board, though, is that most recruiters don’t know how to use the phone for prospecting. They’ve never been taught the frameworks required for efficient and effective outbound telephone prospecting.

My objective is to teach you telephone prospecting techniques that drive qualified applicants into your pipeline.

You’ll start by learning how to leverage the telephone to maximize your recruiting day. I’m going to teach you how to double or even quadruple the number of dials you make in a much shorter period of time so that you can get your phone block knocked out and move on to other things that are far more enjoyable.

Then I’m going to teach you what to do and say when you get prospects on the phone. You will learn how to reduce resistance, increase the probability that you will achieve your defined objective, and mitigate rejection.

Finally, you will learn how to effectively deal with and get past reflex responses, brush-offs, and objections (RBOs) to more effectively set interviews and qualify.

Before moving forward, though, let’s stipulate a few things:

• You are going to face a lot of rejection on the phone because, statistically speaking, you will generate more real-time interactions with prospects than through any other prospecting channel.
• Most of your calls will not get answered. You’ll connect with between 20 percent and 50 percent of your prospects on average during phone blocks. This is why, when you get a prospect on the line, it counts.
• Most of the reason that you are frustrated with the phone and find making telephone prospecting calls abhorrent is because you or the people who taught you how to prospect are overcomplicating the living stew out of a very simple, straightforward process.
• Nobody really likes telephone prospecting. No matter what I teach you, you will still dislike the phone. That doesn’t negate the fact that to reach peak recruiting performance, you must master telephone prospecting.
• If you want to make mission fast and deliver consistently, you’ve got to accept that telephone prospecting sucks and embrace it.

The Ultimate Key to Success Is the Scheduled Phone Block

Fanatical military recruiters set up daily phone blocks of one to two hours—usually one block first thing in the morning for grads and prior service and blocks in the afternoon and evening for students. During these set blocks, they remove all distractions—shutting off e-mail and mobile devices and letting those around them know that they are not to be disturbed. They set clear goals for how many dials they will make.

This call block is booked as a set and unmovable appointment on their calendar and it is sacred. Nothing interferes.

The most effective way to get the most out of call blocks is high-intensity prospecting sprints (HIPS). Break call blocks into small, manageable chunks, and set goals for those chunks. It is much easier to set a goal to make 15 telephone prospecting calls than 100. It’s far more effective to make as many attempts in 15 or 30 minutes rather than slog through two straight hours.

It is much easier to overcome your initial fears and trepidations a few calls at time. You can wrap your mind around these small chunks.

Put your head down, remove distractions, and push hard during these HIPS; you’ll make far more calls and set many more interviews than you thought possible.

Some people set an overall goal for each daily phone block. For example, they will decide in advance to make 50 dials. Next, they’ll set smaller ten-dial blocks. Then they’ll pump themselves up for these small blocks. When they finish, they give themselves a small reward and move to the next ten calls.

An easy way some recruiters manage their phone blocks is to count backwards from 50. You simply write the numbers 1–50 on a piece of paper. With each dial, you strike through its number, starting with 50 and work your way to one. Many people report that it is much easier to hit telephone prospecting goals using this technique.

No matter what technique you choose, though, schedule your phone blocks on the calendar. Make them appointments with yourself. Keep these appointments sacred and don’t be late.