It’s been a while since I announced my ambitious plan to start a marketing agency within my agency to provide leads for other therapists and mental health agencies.

True to my word, I have hit the ground running with this new venture. As exciting as it has been, it hasn’t come without a few hiccups here and there. To get things started I made it a point to hire a solid team of cold callers to market our services directly to therapists. Therefore I put out a few ads in search of cold callers. A perfect fit for this role would be someone with actual cold-calling experience who understood the nuances of the job. Past ordeals have taught me that picking just anyone off the job market and handing them a script to read out to a client is just a disaster waiting to happen. So I put out the ad and waited.

Before long I started receiving offers and resumes. Some impressed me by way of fitting the criteria I had set forth perfectly. And some sold me on how good, hardworking and quick to learn they were. I picked five applicants out of the mix and decided to give them a chance to prove themselves. I scheduled a call with the applicants on Monday and made it clear that they should be ready to devote at least 4 hours to the initial meeting. Smooth so far, what could go wrong?

On Monday all five showed up in addition to my existing marketing team. They introduced themselves to each other and we started work on the call script. I wanted to see how much they could contribute individually and how well they could work together. On completing the script, I gave each person a chance to go over and practice the script. I had other meetings to attend so I postponed the meeting and scheduled a new meeting.

That’s when things started going wrong. Out of the five, only three showed up. The remaining two just decided not to show up nor give a reason for their absence. I took it in good faith and moved on with the remaining three. We started the mock sales calls. The first applicant started and delivered very well, and the second person also did pretty well. When it was the turn of the third applicant she decided that now was the perfect time to tell me that she was uncomfortable with a mock sales call and that she isn’t going to participate. Bear in mind that I had already described the job and communicated the processes and training s they would be expected to partake in. I excused her and hoped to hear from her later but it turned out she had blocked me on the messaging app we communicated on.

In less than 48 hours I had lost more than 50% of the cold-calling team I was building to start this new venture. As difficult as it was to process, I soldiered on with my two new tried, and tested cold callers. What stuck out to me was that out of the people I hired, the ones that were still with me were the ones that had cold calling experience on their resume and ended up proving to me that they were in fact up to the task. The third person who joined later also had 7 years of cold-calling experience. I guess I should have stuck to my criteria.

The journey has been rough but there have been a few wins as well. We are on a mission to build a system that helps Mental Health professionals rest assured knowing they can take breaks and that whenever they are ready, there will be leads waiting for them at the Lartey Wellness Group.

Follow or journey on Youtube: https://youtu.be/LfLssFme98M

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