Coaches Corner - Call Fatigue
Watch the Full Video Here: Coaches Corner - Call Fatigue
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All right. Well, guys, welcome to Coach's Corner. The very first topic that I want to discuss is from Kevin. I'm just going to read it to you guys again. How veteran Asian structure their days to be more efficient and more productive in a day. Um, so take it away, guys.
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For all seriousness. Yeah. I mean, the veterans that are very efficient obviously want to hear from.
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What I usually did, Kevin, was basically I sat down. I was here at the 8:00 meeting. I'm in the office, so everybody's going to be a little different. But 8:00 meeting, you know, you go into that, it can run until nine, um, breakout rooms if you're having them. But I just like to be on the phones immediately. Like if they're, if they're loading leads in the morning, I want to be the first ones to those leads. And I also want to be first in line for, you know, getting the live transfers. You know, if a bunch of live transfers start popping off and a lot of people don't get to the phone until ten.
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So you can get a lot of live transfers in that hour. Uh, also, you know, I just always set a schedule just to eat. Like I always brought my food with me when I was dialing because it only takes me like five minutes to eat. So I would take 15 and actually try to digest it a little bit. Um, but then it would be right back to dialing. So that really let me get done by six every day and still crush it and not have to spend a all weekend here because that was never my goal.
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I always viewed Sunday as a. As a day to get as much as I could out of the way to where it wouldn't interfere with my week. So like Sunday, I would always clean my apartment meal prep. I buy a meal prep service now so I don't have to worry about that. But it's like, um, cleaning my apartment, trash dishes, whatever would take time away from my workweek. I would try to get it done on Saturday evening and Sunday, just clear out as much as possible.
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Um, also, like, for me, I just. I make myself come to the office, like, could work from home, but I wouldn't work efficiently from home. And I mean, I know some agents like you have to start identifying your distractions. So like, hey, what's, what are the biggest things keeping me from making calls? And then you have to come up with a game plan to either eliminate or mitigate those distractions. Obviously, kids are a distraction. I'm not saying get rid of your kids, but like mitigate the distraction as much as possible, you know what I mean? So you have to start out with like taking a self inventory and being honest with yourself and like, all right, what are the things keeping me from doing this? How can I mitigate that?
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I love that. Okay.
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think it has a lot to do with self-discipline. This job is isn't physical at all. It's all mental. So you got to get your mind right and kind of think having your wise having a vision board or having your whys right there in front of you where you can see them, that way you're not getting up and going to do something for five, ten minutes, coming back and then going for 30 minutes later on that self discipline of being here, being able to just sit down, have your set dial time, like Ernie was saying, have your scheduled lunch, scheduled break and have that scheduled down to a tee and get consistent with that.
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The best agents are the best agents because of consistency, right? It's not some magic that happened. They just they did what they needed to do day after day after day. Their skill set increased and that's how they got to the spot that they're at now. So writing out your schedule and sticking to it, don't let yourself waver from it. That's the first step.
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And then the second is killing it. Yeah. Well.
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You know, very rarely have agents come in and are just, like, perfect out of the gate, right? They can just come make sale after sale after sale. That is like a. 1 in 100. Somebody that's probably been in the business before probably has a lot of previous sales experience. But if you're coming in and you don't have that, you really got to work hard to earn it and kind of build up that skill set. And that all starts usually within your first 90 days. If you can come in and you can tell yourself, Hey, for the next 90 days, I'm going to grind like I've never grinded before, I'm going to put in 12, 14 hour days.
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I'm going to work Saturdays. You're making it to where after 90 days you shouldn't have to do that. You can come in and you can do an average schedule of, you know, 8 to 10 hours and you won't have to work every Saturday because your goals will be hit on Friday.
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So come in for the first 90 days and just grind like you've never done it before.
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And what he's saying is you're just trying to get to mastery as fast as possible. Mean you're never going to get to real mastery. I mean, yeah, you get close, but they say 10,000 hours. So, you know, ten years from now we could probably get there. But in a big thing, guys, you'd be surprised at how often you'll hear like the question is asked, Well, I have to do this today. I have to do this. I got, you know, got to pick up the kids from school. But those same people were able to do all those things and still do their full time job that required them to be there all day because it's amazing.
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Like what we what we think we have to do isn't always the case. Like if we have to go to a 9 to 5 job, we will figure out, you know, the kids will figure out a ton of stuff because we know we can't leave there. So that's the main thing. And it has to really you know, what Josh is saying is true. The schedule has to be your schedule and you literally can't leave, you know, your workstation. If you if you treat it like that, it will make a huge difference.
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All right. Anybody have any specific things that they do that they want to share to help everybody?
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I'd like that. That I've done. Oh, I'm sorry, Josh.
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No, you're fine.
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Like to have some agents that. Five hours consistently come off and share what they're. What they're doing that work. So that's perfect. Thank you.
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Yeah. Kevin, you got the floor?
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Um, yeah, well, that was just a suggestion. You know, I've worked for myself for a while, so, you know, being disciplined and being accountable to yourself is. Is the key. Uh, you know, came from the restaurant business. So when you think you're actually doing work, I actually downloaded an app with a time card and kind of treated it like that. So when you actually sitting down and actually doing work, you punch in, you get up, take a break, you punch out, you take lunch, you punch out. And then when you think you really had a good work week and really, really see your time card, that's your accountability.
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So, you know, they keep you disciplined.
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What's that app called? Kevin.
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Uh, I can't remember. It's. There's multiple apps. I think it's time card, time, card plus possible. But just you just punch in, punch out, and then, you know, at the end of the week, you really see how many hours you really work because how many times you punch in. Then you go drop a load of laundry in and then you come back, you make a few calls, you punch and you punch out and you really add those hours up through the week. It really makes a change. You'll see, you know, you're only accountable to yourself in the end.
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I love that. Kevin It's almost like you could look at it like every time you check out or clock out, you know, basically the customers aren't being served. If you treat it like it's another business, like, well, I can't feed these customers. I can't repair whatever they need to repair. Like if you're clocked out, you're clocked out. It basically means you're not doing any work. It is gold. I like it.
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You got to think of it like you're you're you are your own business, right? Just imagine if you were a corner store and every time you had to go do something, you had to shut down your store. Imagine how much business you're going to lose out. You got to close the gas pumps, the inside of the store, everything. You're going to lose so much money, even if it's 5 or 10 minutes that you're gone. Just think of the amount of people that are going to pull up to your store to buy something and not be able to come inside to do it or purchase gas from you. You're just losing money left over or hand over fist.
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So. When you think of it like that, it's like, okay, maybe this five minutes, I need to be here.
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And then Justin put in a very good this can kind of work for what Kevin said without downloading anything. If you go to connect my voice and go to your call log, so you just go to mailbox and call recordings, you can look at every single dial you made and it gives you a timestamp. So if you see like, oh, six minutes passed between, you know, the next dial, five minutes passed like those are little breaks mean little five minutes between calls a lot. But um, those are going to add up to huge blocks of time that are being wasted if you're just sitting there like, All right, let me evaluate.
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I mean, that's what happens, guys. We know it because, you know, we sit there little call hesitancy. We start evaluating the lead. We read all the notes that every single other person wrote before we make the call, only to have them not answer. So evaluating leads is a big waste of time. It's just like, well, I'll just dial it. And you know, as their as it's ringing, look at it. Do the best you can and hopefully they pick up.
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Beer, Zack. Go ahead.
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Sorry, Justin. Go ahead, buddy.
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Was a preparation feeds for your guys, too. So like, you don't have to like and it's a muscle that you built, right? So this this habitual just pounding it every day. Listen, if you don't feel like you're getting enough done, give yourself more to do today. Have to do new agent training one on one activity. Targets from my recruiting make a new email blast campaign. Um, shout out someone make new Facebook ads for someone that I help in my family. Make another set of Facebook ads somewhere else. Do a video for American Home Life Patriot app. Set up a business taxing and set a new audience for some ads and running for recruiting.
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Send someone money, order some stuff online. Do make a YouTube video. Already got one of those done this morning. So it's like, you know, am I going to get all this stuff done today? No. But if you feel like you're not get enough done, give yourself more to do. And it's a it's a habit that you build up over time. Okay. So if you have trouble with that discipline and you know, and like I'm ADHD, all that stuff, they want me on all the meds, right? But it's like I like, you just build it up over time or you focus on and you, you have that stuff built up. Take inventory every time you get Anybody here ever work in a call center for customer service before may have asked us the other day.
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Anybody do it, Raise your hand.
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I know Nicky did okay.
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If you weren't on the phone. Yes. Yeah. Nicky, if you weren't. If you just took, like, you just kind of weren't on the phone, you're just hanging out. What would happen?
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They would tell me to clock out and go home. Yeah, exactly. And make no money for the day.
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Yeah. So just, you know, have that just take that inventory. Especially as a new agent, those reps are super important. Preparation. Feeling like you have to know everything and get ready for everything and know this and that. If you're worried about learning anything except your script, when you start, you're prioritizing the wrong thing.
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But sorry, post corn bombs.
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I was going to say, kind of compared to what Ernie was saying about tracking your time by going to connect me voice.
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Zach said something to me back when I was an agent and it resonated with me, like super deep.
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But say you do an eight.
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Hour day, you dial 200 calls in that eight hours and you have one minute in between each call, right? Just one minute of a breather. That's 200 minutes a day within your eight hour day that you start breathing. Right? Not not dialing. That is almost three hours out of your eight hour day, which is more than a third of your day that is spent in between calls. Now, imagine if that's 2 minutes or 3 minutes in between a call that time just because there's small chunks of time when you're doing it with so with such a large number, it can add up to be a big number very, very quickly.
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So keeping track of that and trying to minimize the time in between calls that you're spent doing other things that can greatly increase your activity greatly.
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And wanted to share the screen real quick just to show you guys what we're talking about, because sometimes we just say stuff. And if you're in connectome voice, this is something, you know, Justin probably got a video on it. I have a video on it on how to set up your connectome voice. But once you're in here. You'll be in mailbox. Hall recordings.
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You always have to search every single time you have to search something. So yesterday.
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And you can literally, like go through here and figure out if there was time wasted. So this is a full minute. Because one second 14 seconds. So there's a full minute. There is like 30 minutes there. It's just little things add up to a lot like what happened in this four minutes while you were waiting. You know, it's just something very simple to do. It's like, how much time are you actually wasting?
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Progressive dialling can help with that too, for if you're just reluctant. Right? Right.
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That way you only got to hit it like, you know, we double dial all of them, but the progressive dialing gets the first dial out of the way. So if you guys don't know how to do that, get with your coaches. What happens is you hit your lead. You'll disposition a call and then it'll immediately bring up the next lead and then instantly call that next person.
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And anybody else have a systematic approach to setting up their day that wants to help us out.
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I just say if you're having issues or having issues with a schedule or find yourself getting up too much or, you know, not being focused, you always have those coaches and you always have someone around that's willing to help you sit there, make a schedule for you. I know Josh did that with me. That helps too. So there are people that will help you, you know, figure out a schedule for yourself.
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Um.
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Another thing you can do, too, is like, if you struggle, sticking to the schedule that you made is you can make it into like a Google calendar and push the notifications to your phone so your phone will get like an alarm or like an alert whenever you're supposed to be doing the next thing on your schedule.
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Good point. And sometimes, guys, it can be as simple as grabbing an accountability buddy that will sit in that same zoom room with you. It's like and it doesn't have to be super. You know, obviously it's good to write down your consistent schedule, but if you're going through a rough, you know, patch for a couple hours or something, get into another room. It's like, Hey, man, I'm like somebody you don't even know. It doesn't have to be the same team. Like, Hey, I'm going to sit in here. We're both going to disconnect our audio and we're going to start dialing because I need to see somebody else doing it. Or sometimes it's just about talking to somebody else for 3 or 4 minutes, like get into somebody's room, talk to them, and then get out and get back to it.
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We're all here too, right? Mean, we don't want to micromanage people, but we'll micro train you. But hey, look, if you're like, Dude, I need some accountability on my schedule, I can be that person for a little bit. I can't want it more than you, right? We can't want it more than you, but we can help with that. You know, we we'll set the reminder every hour to text you and, you know, get to work or whatever you need.
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We'll do that for. For a while. Yeah, Yeah. Couple of days. I'd be like, I can't remember this. I'm sorry.
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You know, a big thing, too, is a lot of you guys have families, right? A lot of people here have families feel like, you know, if someone's. Single no kids. And, you know, there's only so much that can come up in the day for you to. I mean, even if you're in a relationship, right? I mean, you know.
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You know how much time you spend with your significant other, right? You should understand that you gotta hustle and grind to make money. They don't. And that's another topic. But, you know, if you have kids. Don't have children, so I can't say anything. But the super successful people I know who have kids, they get their kids on a strict schedule. They're in bed by like seven, 730. It was in ten. We'll listen to you this morning. Grant Cardone, he said he said he had a kid and he couldn't work less. So what did he do? He slept an hour less every day. He woke up an hour earlier. He put his kids on a schedule where they went to bed a lot earlier.
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So they woke up a lot earlier. And then his time with his daughter was in the morning. He spent an hour with her every morning. It was just her 100%, you know, her and him. She'd wake up at like five. He'd spend an hour with her or whatever. And that was that was his thing. So if you're getting your family on the same page as important, a friend of mine, Jeremy, who works with he is he has like four boys under ten years old. Right. And runs his own business. That's a lot mean for boys under ten. You know, boys are kind of boys are all over the place. And he he said that what he did and he does he makes it a game with his family.
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So when he started selling insurance. Right. So. He said, Hey, once Dad hit 7500 AP, then you got Dad for the rest of the week. So if he if he hit 7500 by Wednesday, then great. They had that Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If he had said if it took him till Saturday, then, hey, they didn't have that time. That time. But it kind of got everybody on a game where it was like, Oh, cool, Dad, did you Dad, let's go. Let's get let's make sure. Don't bother Dad. He's going to.
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Hit his, you know, he's got to hit his number.
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So don't know, just, just an idea like said don't have kids. But there are plenty of people here that do that maybe could reach out to if maybe you have trouble kind of that stuff. And every kid's different. So if you're special needs children and in in all that stuff, which is definitely a, you know, different impact and don't want anybody to live that way, just want you guys to be able to accomplish your goals for yourself and your kids to.
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Yeah. And Lexi saying, make your kids your coach. And this this is bigger. It's bigger than just the kid thing. Every single person in your life that, especially in your household, has to understand your schedule. I mean, they have to understand that this is what I do. James and I were talking about this on his way out yesterday about, you know, Sam doesn't constantly contact him throughout the day unless it's something very important, simply because he has a lot of work to do. And, you know, he's very much like me. He's going to want to fix her problems. So it could easily take him away.
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So that's something he's worked out with, Sam. It's something that we all have to work out with our significant others because if they're not on the same page, it makes this job really hard.
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And the stuff they say. Kevin Like because you brought this up like post your, um, convention qualifying thing on the fridge for the family. Um, I do like that with Jeremy. I, Jeremy and he. Yeah. For kids. I don't know. They were all under ten. Jesus. Uh, that's terrible. Uh, so, um. But yeah, if the family can motivate you, that's that's even better. Like the family can motivate you. That probably motivated Jeremy if he was making a plan for a Friday and he was only at three on a Wednesday, he was probably grinding late night into Wednesday because he knew he had to do it Wednesday night and Thursday so he could do something with the kids on Friday.
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So, you know, our schedules become what we want to do later. That's the really main thing for me is like, I want to get this done so I can do the things I want to do. You know, a lot of my stuff that I want to do is work, so I'm a little weird, but that's okay. At least I'm having fun while I'm doing it.
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And trust me, guys, it's not going to be forever, right? Like.
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Look, right. This.
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This, this it's.
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It's it's really challenging when you start because there's a lot of new stuff to learn. But I promise it gets easier, right? Like for Ernie to jump on the call and make a sale. Yeah. I mean, look at, like, perfect example. Sarah Right. Because she's a she's a trainer for you guys and she's producing as well. Look at Sarah. Right? Mean. Sarah is at the point now where she knows she can get a sale by noon every single day. Right. So so it still worked for her, but it's definitely not, you know, definitely probably doesn't feel the same as it did when she just started out. So it gets to that point where it gets like way easier, right? And people have that flexibility.
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There are people at work a few days a week and hit consistent numbers and make good money every single week. And then they have that a time off because everybody's got different priorities, right? So wants, wants different things. But yeah, so it's just it's just starting out, putting that that extra effort in. So many of you are doing it too. Like I love going through this activity report and seeing all the people like really busting their butts and putting in a huge amount of effort. Like it's, it's pretty it's, I don't know, it's, it's really cool. Like we're really putting in. Considerable effort in.
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That could substitute.
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Another thing that can help people if possible. I read this in a book called Atomic Habits is have a specified place for stuff to happen. So like have a desk and the only thing you do while you're at that desk is work or have another area where it's like, Hey, when I'm here, I'm doing this. So you have like, for instance, I have a little desk in my apartment that I work from on Saturday mornings.
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