Good Call, Bad Call: The Ups and Downs of Telephone Outreach

It's official.  I have hit my first rough patch at my new job.  

As I described last time, a large portion (roughly 40%) of my job is, in fact, getting out onto the floor with the callers and calling our members.  This is important for two main reasons:  First off, to show that we directors aren't simply phantom figures that sit in our office for eight hours a day while our callers slave away at their stations.  Second, it's important for the directors to serve as role models for our callers to show them what good calling both looks and sounds like.  It is the ongoing expectation that the directors are the best callers in the office.  

This expectation is definitely fair.  As directors, we do a lot of staff management and that staff management often times relates to the performance of our callers.  We have to not only analyze performance but be able to listen in carefully to our callers to match up specific skills needed to increase performance.  In our office we have people making minimum wage all the way up to callers who are maxed out in terms of salary and, of course, we have the vast majority of people somewhere in between.  Our goal as directors is to work with all of our callers both individually as well as in small group settings to maximize their potential and it's important that we ourselves have the acquired skills and knowledge to then pass on to our callers to help them succeed.  

However, that is a lot easier said than done.  

This past week, I officially passed 100 calling hours.  According to Malcolm Gladwell, I only have 9,900 more hours before I am officially an expert.  Unfortunately, the organization I currently work for hasn't given me a two-hundred week window so instead they are looking for me to be a consistent caller at this point.  Things started out well and I had a good stretch of three straight weeks in September where I was one of the top callers in the office.  Unfortunately, I am not in the midst of having a three-week stretch where I have been one of the poorer callers in the office and this bad stretch just happened to culminate with the national director's on-site visit to our office last week.  

Timing never has been my thing.  

Fortunately both the national director and my fellow directing team has been supportive of me.  My fellow directors have given me positive feedback including helping me re-adjust my mindset when it came to calling.  My issue up through last week was the fact that I am extremely hard on myself and I expect myself to succeed in what I do as long as I put in enough time and effort.  I am used to life endeavors where I can see noticeable progress as long as work is put in whether it's something like running, or lifting weights, or in my teaching performance by looking at classroom averages on tests.  However, when it came to calling I found that there was no real rhyme or reason as to why I was up for three weeks and then down for three weeks.  I felt like an all-star baseball player, marred in an 0 for 25 slump.  

However, unlike baseball there is no film to analyze.  

Which is what makes calling such a challenging endeavor.  A large part of it is mental and you literally have to have the "memory of a goldfish" as my fellow director so aptly described.  You can be told off during one call and then two seconds later you have to greet a new person with a happy, cheerful tone.  Sometimes, you can do everything right and the member still won't be able to contribute financially to the campaign.  Sometimes a member will go off on you for no apparent reason.  Sometimes a member will want to become involved but won't be able to due to various life circumstances.  All this, and yet as a caller you have to do everything in your power to forget the past minute and do it all over again.  

For four hours at a time.  

At of late last week, I personally felt like I was beginning to call better even though my numbers didn't indicate it.  In addition to regular member calling we have also been doing some GOTV calling on a ballot measure in Oregon to label GMOs.  This kind of calling involves us actually engaging in members and trying to persuade them to vote for the measure.  For me, this has been a good opportunity to sit back and think about the purpose of calling.  That purpose is essentially to tell a good story and to convince people to get involved in what you are working on.  For the ballot measure in Oregon, the purpose is to convince people that GMOs should be labeled and that they should actively work to ensure that this measure passes.  This is the first time I've had a chance to do this kind of calling and it has helped me shift my perspective on calling to that of being a good, engaging and persuasive caller with a higher objective in mind.  

In addition, I've also begun to think about my strengths as a caller and to try and utilize those.  As a native New Englander, I know that I talk fast and so I made it a habit to slow down when I first started calling.  However, when I was struggling the past couple weeks I noticed that often times I wasn't even getting through my script and that somehow I had become less engaging over the phone.  This past week, I sped up my script read and found that I had opportunities to get through much more of the script and to engage people longer about the issues.  I began to realize that I will never sound "sweet" or "kind" as some of our female callers can do so well but what I can do it to be an engaging caller on the phone.  I can talk passionately about the issues, which is why I got into this line of work in the first place.  I feel that if I can utilize this passion going forward then I have the chance to be a much more engaging voice to talk with over the phone.  

Only time will tell if I have, in fact, turned a corner in my calling.  I feel like I am close, but again, calling is such an imperfect art form that there is no way to tell for sure.  All I know is that I am tired of not performing at the level I am capable of and the level I need to be at to properly do my job.  Right now, I feel like an English teacher who constantly writes grammatical errors on the board and his students begin to wonder if he even knows what he's doing.  I don't like that feeling.  I want my fellow directors and the national director to see me perform at the level I am capable of.  In short, I want to be recognized for being good at all aspects of my job.

All I need to do is just go out there and do it.