In this episode of In Search of Excellence, we'll be talking with some of the most successful people in the world who have mastered the art of the cold call, they will be sharing their stories of how cold calling has been critical to their success, and also give us advice on how to get over our fear of cold calling on our path to excellence. You may start out with 99 rejections, but when you get a sound of the 100th person, you will forget about the other
99. Along the way, we'll all learn lessons, how to improve our success rate, what to do is just as important as what not to do. At some point maybe as early as five times it will also become easier, we will lose our fear, and we'll learn how to handle rejection. Cold calling has been a huge element of my success, and it's something I learned when I was 17 years old.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I worked at a company called neural stone construction where I sat at a desk with a phonebook in front of me made 150 to 200 phone calls a day, trying to sell home improvements to residents in lower income neighborhoods in
the city of Detroit. My job was to get leads and if any of my leads resulted in an actual job, I would get a commission in addition to the $5 per hour I was making over eight weeks, I made more than 6000 calls with at least 2000 of them to elderly residents who are just happy to speak to somebody and hear my voice of the 6000 Plus calls I
made. I had one sale to a 70 year old woman who needed some aluminum siding on our house, I made $1,300 from that sale, six and a half weeks worth of pay, or 81% of what I made that summer. While it was a ton of money for me the lessons I learned that summer from making those 6000 calls were 100 times more important than the money. I lost the fear of rejection of people telling me to lose their number and never call them again, of hanging up on me and
swearing at me. I was no longer afraid to pick up the phone and call somebody I didn't know. I was no longer afraid to go up to somebody and introduce myself. Over the next 10 years, I mastered the art of cold calling. I went door to door to every room in college at the University of Michigan asking people to buy T shirts I'd made more than 95% of people didn't want to buy one. But 5% did, which resulted in a 1000s of dollars which went to good use,
including a lot of pizza. When I was 26 years old and wanted a career change. I sent 300 Cold letters to the CEOs of some of the most successful companies in the world and landed in impossible to get job, one that didn't even exist with Eli Brode, who at the time was only one of three people who have started to Fortune 500 companies. Since then I've cold
called investors. I've cold call potential customers who became customers, resulting in many 10s of millions of dollars in sales, which have created billions of dollars in value for our portfolio companies. I've cold called potential employees and hire them including a 30 year veteran of Anderson Consulting, which has $175 billion valuation and convinced them to join an eight person startup in Santa Monica, California, where he
made $100,000 a year. I've cold call entrepreneurs I wanted to meet an investor with them enjoy the show. I want to talk about two of the jobs you had in college and focus on one in particular work at a summer camp during two of your summers one before you graduated college and in the summer. After freshman year in
college. During another summer, you worked at a Merrill Lynch brokerage office in New York City where your main job was to cold call clients and ask them to open an account, get a zip code list and had to make 100 cold calls a day. You cold call for eight weeks, which meant you made 500 calls a week or 4000 calls in total. It was agonizing. And after the first week you went home and told your dad that you couldn't do this for the entire summer. And he said yes you can that you
committed to it. So you need to finish it. And he said to you that you needed to find a way to make it into a game to make it more exciting. Out of the 4000 calls over eight weeks you got two meetings, that's the hit rate of point 0005 Which equates to five one hundredths of 1% of these two meetings one open an account of success rate of point 000 to five which equates to 2.51 hundredths of 1%. Similar to you I had an internship at Merrill Lynch mine was part of a
senior high school project. I didn't do any cold calling there but I did a lot of it two summers later when I worked at a company called mural stone construction for eight weeks, I was given a phonebook a telephone and a desk and would call 100 people a day on a phone where my boss would listen and where I could ask people in lower income neighborhoods in Detroit if they needed a home improvements. Most of the people I call were old and lonely and they were happy to be speaking
to someone on the phone. All right, the same exact success rate one sale, which resulted in a commission check of $1,300 which I still have a copy of going back to your two meetings in the one account is incredible as this is your boss told you that the end result was highly successful. Do you remember who opened that account the size of the account and how much you were paid for that. And the game you developed to make this
somewhat fathomable. And In Search of Excellence, how important is it to develop and have cold calling skills, which most people hate to do. And it keep coming after it, despite the nonstop rejection when people will hang up on you, or be rude to you, or even swear you and call you names?
Well, first of all, I think the the point you made that the world has changed a lot at that point in time, there were a lot of people that I got on the phone that would talk to me. The world is different today. I don't think that this kind of cold calling that works works the same way
today. But I you know, I think you make an interesting point, what I take away from the experience is not so much what the hit rate was, I had never done that math myself, although I think the interesting thing about is the experience of having to get comfortable picking up the phone, calling someone and trying to figure out how to get them to talk to you. And I think it's a valuable skill. I think it's I'm glad I
did it. I think the the difficulty of doing that over and over and over and over again throughout a day required, I think, a good amount of resilience, persistence. And it was something that was really important. I think the advice my dad gave me that look, you signed up for this. And you got to finish it was really good advice. And I think that carries through to a lot of things. Not all things are easy. Not all things are going to be as productive as you'd like them to
be. But at the same point, if you take something on, you know, you really have a responsibility to try to complete it to try to finish it. I do not remember the name of the person who opened up the account. I you know, I may I do remember, the name of the Merrill Lynch broker who I was working for his name was Mark Pollard. I was not paid anything. i It was a summer internship, it was a, it was a non paid summer internship. If I was paid, I was paid a very,
very small stipend. And there was no commission attached to opening an account. It was really the experience of being in that office. And learning a little bit about how that that business, you know, that business worked. I will say the following summer, I went back to working at the summer camp. And so so it was a, it was an interesting experience. But I think I like being outdoors, I spent the rest of my summers during college, outdoors working
at a summer camp. So maybe that reflects a little bit on the nature of how I felt about that experience.
I started my entrepreneurial career at University of Michigan selling T shirts as well, I'd print them for $5. And back then you had to go in the phonebook to find companies that printed 100% Cotton shirts, the 5050 shirts were not good quality. So I took $4 In my permits for money, made the shirts I sell the short sleeve shirts for 12. The long sleeves were $6 I sold them for $18 I go door to door in the dorms, get kicked out, go into another floor, go to another
dorm and get kicked out. But the cold calling skill was invaluable to my future as well as the ability to get turned down and go to the next sale because you forgot about their previous sale. When you made money How is cold calling fit an important factor in your own success.
You learned to accept rejection, you know, as a as an entrepreneur, as anybody, you know, you're gonna face a lot of rejection. But as an entrepreneur, you seek the rejection, right? You go and you call people and you know, as a regular person, you often people try to kind of shun away and they don't they don't they're not vulnerable, then but that's
the point, right? That's being vulnerable, calling somebody and letting them not only say I'm not interested, but say your stuff is crap, I don't want this. I mean, you don't know what they're gonna say cuz you don't know what moment you're gonna cash them in, they may just insult you, you know, you know. So you have to have a strong rejection muscle, you also have to be able to after that you have to perfect your
approach. Because every time you get to know, you learn what you shouldn't say or what may not be appealing to the people. And every time you get a yes, you learn what is appealing to people and what triggered the response. So I think it is, it's critical. And you can only do that once you put yourself out there in real time in real action. If you sit there and just look at books and only and wait for the perfect time to happen, you're never going to get that interaction with
somebody else. So you can never improve. You can only think in your head that you have everything but sooner or later if you you got to get out of the gate and cold calling is and knocking on doors and standing on corners is the ultimate way to see if you have something of value and a lot of us, we're not going to have anything of value. We're going to have to close it up and then restart over again a little more wisely.
There's a stadium in Michigan holds 100 And now today it used to hold 100,000 holds 160 and 1000s the biggest stadium in the United States, but I would stand out there with boxes of shirts and hand them out or sell them to 100,000 people going by most of which went down one street so that was placement distribution, very important to success.
You're 21 years old. You head off to New York City and you're going to walk into one of the most successful famous modeling agencies in the world without an apple I meant, basically show off say, Hey there. I'm Sharon and I like to meet with Eileen Ford. I mean, there's a lot of people listening in Washington today who may be thinking of a really bold idea, but they're really afraid to go for it. They're really afraid to try it.
They're thinking in a million years, there's a negative 0% chance of this ever happening.
What's the worst thing that can happen? They're gonna say, No, it started out with no, if you end up with no, so what? But if you don't try, you're never gonna get a yes.
Good. So that's so say it again. What What should people do when the odds are one in a billion?
Go get it. Go get it. I mean, my dad had esophageal cancer, they gave him a 3% chance of living three months. We tortured my father, we told him to wash the car in his tuxedo, so he could get somewhere out of it. And my dad beat esophageal cancer. Who has who beats a 3% chance of even making it three months, who beats it and lives, the people who want to the people who say they're going to the people who say, I'm not doing that? I'm not
dying. The people who decide to win, that's who wins the people who choose to win. That's who wins. The people who go in and say, I'm going to do this. She's going to throw me down the flight of stairs and bounce the fat off my ass. Well, guess what I wish someone would, because I want to win. If that's what it takes. Let's do it. I'll stand at the top you push.
When I was 26, I was very unhappy lawyer. I want to get out of the law. And I had an idea I was gonna write letters to CEOs of big companies asking for meetings. And everyone said Phil are never going to meet with you. I wrote 300 letters I got at meetings. Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney Sumner Redstone, who was started Viacom. These are themes of In Search of Excellence, that one of the things is believe in yourself, anything is possible. So I love your story. For
those who say thank you say please. And thank you to everyone who gives you an opportunity. Call them Mr. And Mrs. Don't think you can waltz in there and start calling people buy their first names. Don't think that people don't remember if you don't say thank you. Or please, it is really important to acknowledge people and let them know that it means something that they had a minute for you.
handwrite, a thank you note.
I hand wrote thank you notes to every single cast and crew member of all my films for as long as I could, until my career got so overwhelming that I couldn't. And there were 200 300 people on every film set. And I got every every handwritten note to everybody as long as I could.
And I'm sure every single person who received one of your notes is still talking about it today when your name comes up in a conversation. And again, that's just it's great advice. It's great form.
And still now I tried to come up with some kind of crew gift, so that everybody gets something from me, I want some I want everyone to know that. I see you. I see your dragon cable. I see you're out here in the cold and the wet. I see the hard work you're doing on behalf of this film. I get that you're there. I get that you're working.
I sell T shirts, door to door and one of the most important and valuable lessons I learned in college was going door to door and cold calling and getting 100 doors shut in your face, like you said, but it's the one sale after the one sale. You don't care about the other 99 people that said no.
Yeah, I totally agree. I remember one business I did. And college also kind of ties into the kind of go to market strategy, who's your customer kind of mentality, which is I had this idea that of selling fruit baskets to students during exam week that instead of just eating junk food if you're staying up kind of late, it eat fruit, but I knew the students themselves probably wouldn't have the desire to buy the fruit nor necessarily even
the money to buy the fruit. So I ended up targeting their parents and said, while your kids are studying hard, don't you want to eat healthy and that actually worked out pretty well where were parents were willing to foot the bill to get these these fruit baskets to their to their kids doing that intense exam timeframe just so it's another example of seeing an
opportunity. At that point I happen to be in college figuring out what to do in terms of that particular product, but then also figuring out what's the best way to essentially bring that park product to market and who are the logical customers for that which even though the consumer was the student that better customer to pay for it was their parents
You started your first business when you were 12 years old. And you did it in a pretty unique way your dad was playing poker with his buddies, drinking and whipping it up and you went into the room, grabbed a doughnut and told him you wanted a new pair of expensive Chuck Taylor Converse basketball shoes. Your dad said the shoes on your feet were working fine. And that when you got a job, you could buy whatever you wanted.
At that point, one of his buddies who was drunk said, hey, I can get you a job, I have all these trash bags, that you can sell them door to door and you said done. You charge $6 They cost you three. So he made $3 per bunch, that when you were 60, and you started a stamp company, you went to stamp shows and trade shows, you would trade up from one stamp to the next you knew what you were doing.
Because you'd stay up until 3am or 4am, reading Lin Stamp News and Scott stamp journals and then have them all memorized to give yourself an edge. You also earn money by selling baseball cards and rare coins. When you were 16. You took advantage of a Pittsburgh post because that strike by driving 130 miles to the plan in Cleveland where the newspapers were printed, you found a truck coming out of the plant, you convinced the driver to sell you his papers. So you would have to drive around and
do his rounds. And you drove back to Pittsburgh and sold the papers for five times a cost to make money. You also work at a grocery store stocking shelves in a deli where you sliced off a piece of your finger. You had the entrepreneur G and you were born with it. Can you tell us about the lessons you've learned going door to door as a 12 year old and the importance of hustle and cold calling on our path to excellence? And can you also
tell us about persistence? And how telling potential garbage bag customers that you knew their daughter helped you succeed?
You know, I think what I learned most was how to sell. And that selling wasn't something to be afraid of. Because it wasn't convincing anybody I mean, it wasn't trying to change people's minds. It was trying to help them in so when you know you know when you're 12 years old, going door to door, you know it's Hi, my name is Mark, I live down the street. Do you use garbage bags? It wasn't
good. It was just like, hey, for $6 I'll bring you a box of 100 whenever you need them, all you got to do was call my house and then I'll bring them down to you. And it was that easy. And you know from there, once I got that confidence, it started to get easy whether I was selling stamps, whether I was selling magazines, door to door, it'd be
like Hi my name is Mark. If I could show you how 75 cents a week and improve the education and entertainment of your family and put your kids in a better position at school with 75 cents a week be worth it. Yeah, things that I remember to this day and dealing with objections, those are all things that became a core for me, you know and really built my confidence
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Draper University
logo I was gonna ask you about that
we have logoed Cabo. And they, they get a stack of them. Each team gets a stack of them. And whatever they sell for their team. That money goes into whether they can money that pays for the food and survival training. So there is a great incentive to go ahead and do those things.
If Oh, where did they go? Are they walking up to people on the street of San Francisco?
Yeah. And then random train on the way there. We always say you've got to get a life story of the person next to you on the train. So on the train up, they get the life story. They get to San Francis Let's go. They have to, they usually go to Union Square, they sell the condoms. And then they we may have to combine those two things, then they have to go get a job, and then they come back. But they've been two trips to San Francisco historically.
I think there's two things that I'm hearing when I, when you share this with us, the first is the art of cold calling, I think the ability to cold call, as a founder as an executive, I think that's critical to our success. And the other thing that I think of is the ability to close. So where where do you? Do you think cold calling is a necessary skill for those who are going to start a company, you've got nothing, you got a piece of paper, you got a
business plan? You think, Gosh, I hope somebody likes what I'm doing. I hope I can raise money from someone, some people don't raise money. I mean, that's the best way to start a company not to raise money, and you own all of it yourself. But where does cold calling come into this? And what do you what do you tell people, people are afraid? I think when you people walk in, they don't know about you gotta go sell condoms, people are
thinking. I mean, in a million years, if you had told some of these people, this, they would have said, I'm never going to do that. So you make people do that. But what are you going to say to all the people out there that have the fear of doing this, because I think that's an impediment to a lot of us a lot of people who you know, to get motivation, and to
stop watching the snooze. That's the thing that scares everybody is scary news. But I also think, when you do it, it changes you. Because you you're afraid to do it, and then you do it. And you go, Oh, that wasn't so bad. And then you also realize that a cold call is really an opportunity to talk to somebody, and to connect. And I think that that's a powerful thing, be it whether you're cold calling or not. I think it it's really important to be able to
connect with people. Even if it's the people you work with, or your customers or whoever, it's important to be able to connect, and I think you have something like that. And, and you know, it's something they can laugh about something they can, you know, tell people oh my god, these guys had it, you know, got me into this. And now I'm selling condoms on the street. And it's actually it's pretty interesting, because some people go and sell the condoms.
And then others, like, become street musicians or whatever mimes. And they try to get money that way. So it's it, it forces them into odd situations that are a little embarrassing. And I think if you can get over your embarrassment, you can do great things get the Think of Elon Musk. Elon says, we're going to Mars. You know, most people are gonna look at him go. That's nuts. But who, who joins him? The best engineers in the world? The ones who are going, that's a cool idea. Let's see what I can
do it that. That's fun. But, you know, how are we going to feed people? How are we going to house people how we're going to clothe people on Mars? And so he ends up with the best engineers in the world. And all because he's not afraid to be embarrassed. And look at what he does. I mean, are hilarious is, I mean, he's doing a brain computer interface. He's doing a boring company and Boris holes in the earth and trap allows
people to travel that way. You know, the guy's willing to stick his neck out over and over and over again. And take the embarrassment at the beginning because he knows down and deep in his heart that he might just be able to do it.
I want to share with our listeners and our viewers I started cold calling when I was a freshman in college I sold T shirts door to door, room to room you knock on the door some people blow you know terrible get out of here and then some people bought the shirts but I bought him for five I sold them for 12 The long sleeve I bought for seven I sold those for 20 bigger margin there. I sold them outside the big house Michigan football
stadium. 100,000 people in and you got your box there and you're selling shirts and I've done it. I've had some success and I've done it. In the last 10 years we had a portfolio company based in Palo Alto, the CIO of Salesforce was the chairman. We were at the big Salesforce conference. We had a little booth in the back and my job was to go and find people and bring them into the booth. You know
what that's like? You're looking at badges and you're pulling people and you get blown off 99% of the time, but couple of people went by the booth. I have a product. It's called a collar card. It's basically a credit card that has four pop out collar stays. We sell them to hotels and dry cleaners. Our business was we had record sales. First quarter Tim's $0, for the first time, the 11 year history of the company, but I went to the clean show two years ago, and I'm sure it's one of
your favorite conferences. It's the dry cleaner show every dry cleaner in the country goes there. I walk it around with my collar cards, and I'm cold calling. Am I fearful? Yeah, the people blow me off. Yeah. Does it bother me? You know, I'm used to it. I'm 52 years old as 50 When I went there, and I still have to do it for my own success. So for those listening
today, you can. Cold calling is something that I think we all need, no matter how young or old or whatever you've done in your career to that point in time.
Oh, no question. I think you're dead on. People have to. And cold calling is. It's a personal connection. And if as soon as you start thinking about it that way, it changes your whole attitude. Then you realize all I'm doing is I'm stepping up somebody's giving them an opportunity if they say no, no big deal, but you get a chance to meet up.
My first job paid job, I worked for a company called mural stone construction. It was a summer job. 16 years old. I sat in a office with six people, we had a phonebook. And we went through the phonebook cold calling people. Hi, I'm Randy from mural stone construction. Are you interested in some aluminum siding today. And we've made 200 calls a day and you have to be on for every single call, sort of like
raising money. You know, you're meeting with 20 venture capitalists and your two weeks Yeah, beyond for every single meeting. But you're a little fatigued if you're 200 200 call it at the end of the day. And I remember I had one sale of I think $70,000 And I remember getting a check for something like $1,800 Oh my gosh, this is amazing. Great. But it really is the greatest thing ever. It's really helped my career and some of the things I've been able to
do. As working at Sun America, I was the assistant to the chairman. Eli Broad was my boss, I want to be an entrepreneur, I had a t shirt business in college. I looked around at a bunch of different things that year, I told Eli that I wanted to leave, I wanted to have my own business. He said you're making a mistake. Of course, he sold the company eight months later, full vesting event for $18 billion dollars, I lost two and a half million dollars of publicly traded options, which
is a, which is an oops. But we invented this technology to serve web content better, faster, cheaper, and more reliably. The company has has created that market, it serves around 30% of the world's web traffic. But back then we were four guys, a professor, a PhD student, a first year business school student, I was the only one with any business background. And it was basically a bunch of math formulas. We started with four computers in a professor's office. That's our
network. We were asking companies like Disney, and the largest websites, CNN, Yahoo, to let us serve their law, live traffic for them. And when I hear the parking lot, which is proof of concept, people are actually buying this what what made it for me was we'd go into these meetings and because of my letter writing campaign, I knew people at all these companies,
very senior people. And when I was, you know, 26 years old, and really nothing a lawyer, no one I was last on their list that I know, you know that I got this great job working for someone of credibility, and I kept in touch with all these people. So I'd get the meeting. And I wasn't sure whether I was going to join, I wasn't going to join the company in Boston, there's no way I was moving there. And we'd get these meetings with mid level managers. It's just okay, Randy, I'll set you up with
someone. And every time people keep kept coming into the room, so it'd be a manager, a senior manager, director, VP, Senior VP, and then the CTO came in every single time you can see the light bulb pop off in their head. And that was what gave me the impetus to join it took me eight months to quit my job. And you know to do that. What was interesting about the story that you tell also, you're you're in
a parking lot. And you're selling scrubs from your car, you're a costing people who have either woken up at four, five or latest six in the morning, hit their coffee, they're going to work a 12 hour day, and you're coming up to them like someone at the beach where you got headphones on but it's even worse because they're going to a tough day in a hospital or they're coming out of a hospital. And they've been there 12 hours 16 hour shift and there you are, hey, will you talk to
me? I mean And the cold calling skill has been invaluable to a lot of people in their career. It's been invaluable to me it helped make my career it did make my career. Did you have any sales experience? Before that you had a traditional background? You are an investment banker? How important is that in our path to axons?
Oh, it's so important. I mean, I, I developed, you know, I really worked hard to develop communication skills over time. But if you're not, you don't know, if you're not selling what you believe in some way in the sale, selling your sales gets kind of a bad rap. It's really convincing somebody of something that you think they need. And it wasn't a hard sell, right? Because the alternative was just
so awful. But I do think, you know, having the ability to communicate a value proposition and having the ability to talk about how you can change someone's life and, and how you could provide them with a better product. And a better experience is really important. And I think, you know, we also did a few things, that I think it was helpful. So we would go to Starbucks, and we would buy the
super huge jugs. And so if you're coming off the night show, and you know, and someone hands you a warm hot cocoa or a hot cup of coffee. You know, healthcare professionals are the most grateful people in the world. And so it really endeared them to us and us to them. And so it's also that it's also understanding as people are coming in and coming out what matters to them. How do you how do you relate what's in and
having those conversations? I mean, we spent a lot of conversations inside the hospital in the cafeteria, we would we would put on our scrubs for time we were healthcare professionals, and just sit right there at the table and ask them what they liked and what they didn't like and what bothered them and around about their the uniforms they were
wearing every single day. So, you know, you get to know people and people are especially healthcare professionals are incredibly generous people generous with their time and their their views and they're so smart and they wanted to even at the the early days, they were so helpful to us.
Back then there was no internet freshman and at seven. Oh, sorry. Yeah, sorry, not didn't right. I was 1986 my bad stuff. No cell phones. So okay, the Yellow Pages is a big thick book with a bowl people who paid more for the bowls, which meant we walked a lot when we wanted to do something a business went door to door sounds like you had done that
before. And you're walking in off the street, you're introducing yourself, it's a cold call, you're trying to convince someone much older than you, you're 18 years old and probably think of what is this kid doing? It was 10 times harder, maybe 100 times harder back then to start a company. You started in college signing guidebooks and posters. So what what was that about? Where did it come from? Did you have a plan to do that?
Talk to I got it. I got to Ann Arbor and something about me quickly understood this entrepreneurially is Woodstock. You know, this is this is like this is Woodstock in the in the 60s, you know, this is this is unbelievable. The freedom to be expressive entrepreneurially once I found myself independent, and in Ann Arbor, and I don't know why but I couldn't come I was so excited about all the opportunity and, and my reaction
to opportunity is to create. And the the poster business that I created was sort of a riff off of the modern art posters that I saw in people's dorm rooms and and my reaction to that was, that's amazing, I should do my maybe there should be a modern art version of of the Michigan logo, you know, the black M and modern art versions of other schools logos. And why pay somebody to do it professionally. Let's have a contest for students to enter.
And and and that worked. And then there should be a cultural handbook when you when you get to your dorm and get on campus every semester. And that worked. And so I just started to try things and those were days when I or nights more accurately and limited to being in a fraternity and doing all the things that thankfully I did more that were sort of, you know, more cliche or core to the college
experience. I chose a different path to complement those more traditional activities called creating businesses and it's helped me figure out who I was