Aren't you sick and tired of being sick and tired of the same lame excuses from sales professionals?

You know those excuses that put all of the power and responsibility for the sale into the hands of the unknown gatekeeper on the other end of the line. Pathetic, whiny excuses like, "I can't get past the gatekeeper." "My product really is not sold at the top levels of an organization" and "I hate cold calling."

A whole, new, untapped world of profit awaits ...

The sales professional who believes and behaves as though the responsibility for a sale rests with him, believes in the system and watches as the world becomes his oyster, full of precious pearls he only dreamed of, now ripe for the plucking.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a story about the difference between saying you believe something and actually believing. It went something like this ...

Kevin, a gregarious, fun loving student drew a seemingly boring topic out of the hat for his creative writing class. The topic, "The Law of the Pendulum." His fellow students yawned and mimed b-o-r-i-n-g ... while our guy's creative juices began to flow.

The day came. The teacher asked him to present his writings verbally in front of the class. Being a bit of a ham, he was delighted by the challenge and smiled at the prospect of making a boring topic quite the opposite.

Kevin demonstrated the Law of the Pendulum with a small model of a pendulum that fit on the desk top. He went on to explain as he lifted the Pendulum out to the right that when he let go of it, the Pendulum would swing back and forth, each swing becoming shorter and shorter until it came to rest perpendicular to the ground.

As he demonstrated, sure enough, true to the Law when Kevin let go of the pendulum it never did reach his hand again, each swing of the Pendulum became shorter and shorter until it came to rest perpendicular to the table top.

Kevin said, "How many of you believe this Law of the Pendulum?" All raised their hands and applauded as the instructor made his way to the front of the classroom.

To the surprise of all, Kevin said, "Hold on, I'm just getting started."

He invited the teacher to sit in a chair, back against the wall. He then released a 250 pound pendulum from in front of the teacher's face. And whoosh the pendulum swung to one side of the room and half-way upon its return, Kevin, reports, the teacher did a nose dive to the center of the room.

And in keeping with the Law of the Pendulum, as all could see, with each swing of the Pendulum's return fell shorter and shorter of the Teacher's seat.

"How many of you think the Teacher believes the Law of the Pendulum?"

Not one hand was raised.

Now, for the point of this writing ... whether you believe these facts or not is up to you. But here are six things you didn't know, you didn't know about cold calling.

1. You get the appointment because of the words you say... that's also why you don't get appointments.

2. The gatekeeper's willingness to schedule you for an appointment has to do with how you present yourself on the telephone ... so does her determination to send you to a lower level decision maker

3. Presented with the same prospecting call information and two sales professionals from the same company ... one will believe he can present products/services to executives; one will believes he can not. Both are right.

4. Cold calls are only cold until you learn how to warm them up

5. There are three desirable outcomes that you can get with every prospecting call you make: an appointment; a time to call back for an appointment; precisely why you are not interested in doing business with the prospect

6. Executive assistants are actively looking for the right people to admit to the executive suites, if you don't get in 97.9% of the time the reason is you did not use "executive level" language when talking with the assistant.

The majority of sales pros want to blame gatekeepers for closed doors. Successful sales professionals, on the other hand, look to what they can control, themselves, and tweak for success.