[MUSIC] So now you have an identified prospect, have written a compelling pre-call contact piece, and have all kinds of reasons to seek a visit. What if any might be potential barriers to your success? Here are four potential obstacles that you may need to overcome. Call reluctance, time management, inadequate preparation, and gatekeepers. Call reluctance is a topic we have already addressed. Cold calls are not the first thing everyone wants to do with their day. We know it is important to have a positive attitude when approaching this part of our job. If things are not going our way, ask yourself the question, do I need to step away for awhile? Maybe your biorhythms are off. Change the location you are making calls from, stand while you are making your calls. I find it adds a different feeling to the conversation. Ultimately, do not let artificial barriers get in your way. Time management can also be a significant barrier to scheduling qualification calls. We have multiple tasks on our plate, many involving pressing deadlines or current donors which makes it easy to put off making these calls. To help overcome this barrier consider the following. Schedule a time to make calls on your calendar. Track the number of attempts you make each day and each week. Where do you make your calls from? Do you need to get away from your desk to avoid distractions or interruptions? In some respects, it is a numbers game, and it must be a priority. Remember that in some cases, a no is also a positive as it allows you to disqualify a prospect and to move on. Inadequate preparation can also lead to limited success in cold calls. Make certain you have done your homework before making your call. Don't just wing it. While it's not scripted, do anticipate or outline what you will say. Always know your prospect beyond just their phone number. Before you make your call think about the information you will use to generate interest in seeing you. Remember, it's not just a numbers game, quality matters. The final obstacle for our discussion is the gatekeeper. This could be a spouse or a professional assistant who stands between you and your prospect. When dealing with a gatekeeper keep the following in mind, first, treat them like a prospect, in the case of a spouse, they are, and could be included in your request for a meeting. With the assistant, acknowledge the difficult role in managing a busy schedule and express sincere appreciation for their help. On a side note, when you get your appointment, remember their name. Seek them out and thank them again for their help. If your visit goes well, you will need them again in the future. You can also try to call when they are not there, times such as late in the afternoon or early evening. Also remember that email is more likely to go directly to your prospect than a phone call. In his book, John Greenhoe describes the process for cold calls using the acronym OARS. It is a disciplined and sensible method for approaching cold calls. O standing for one hour each day. Keep your pipeline full and make a commitment to this effort by actually scheduling time on your calendar. A, standing for at least 7 calls for valid prospect. Reaching prospects takes time. The number may seem arbitrary, but the point is one phone call or one email that is not returned does not constitute a sincere or successful effort to reach your potential prospect. R stands for recycle your prospects. For those who are unsuccessful in reaching, don't automatically write them off completely. Let a few months pass and try again. Any number of things could be happening in someone's life at the time of your initial outreach. Don't automatically assume they were not interested. And finally S, standing for see them or cross them off. Again, back to the notion that sometimes a no is a positive thing. Every fundraising organization has a few names on a prospect list that people want to keep pressing. If they are not interested in meeting with you, it may not be forever. But you can put them aside for now and focus your energy on another potential donor. Another item to give serious consideration to when attempting to set an initial visit is who you are sending to the meeting, it matters. Perhaps the prospect is interested in your organization but for some reason you are not the right person for the outreach. Always consider the best fit when determining who will be making the initial contact. The donor's comfort level with your organization's representative is critical. A real-life example from earlier in my career taught me this valuable lesson. I was working for North Dakota State University and I had identified via prospect research an alumnae who was living in San Francisco who seem to be the perfect potential donor on paper. She had enjoyed a successful career in finance, and was now semi-retired and still had a homestead property in rural North Dakota that she had restored and visited frequently. I attempted, on a number of occasions, to schedule a meeting with her when I was traveling in northern California. I dutifully had sent my pre-call contact letter, made my phone call and while we had a pleasant conversation on the phone I struck out. I had a former classmate reached out on my behalf with similar results. Just when I thought all hoe was lost, I had a member of my annual giving team who would be attending a conference at San Francisco. Contact the prospect to see if she would accept the meeting. To our surprise the answer this time was yes. The meeting occurred and my team member came back with a piece of the puzzle we had not seen. Our alum was a graduate of the college of Home Economics but had had a tremendous career in Finance. She had wanted to be a math major when she was in school. However, in her words, they made her be a home ec major because that is where the girls were put. Two months later, she agreed to meet me for coffee. The first thing she said as I sat down at the table was, you sent a woman. My prospect was not comfortable with the contact from a male staff member from an institution she believed had discounted her abilities on the basis of gender. Long story short, after that first meeting, and a lengthy and involved cultivation plan my prospect became a donor then a trustee of the foundation board. Subsequently, she became the single largest donor to NDSU Library, and chaired our Finance and Investment Committee for over a decade. I wish I could tell you that was more than just a matter of luck that we had a female colleague make an outreach effort, but I can tell you that it helped shape my perspective on this issue for the rest of my career.
