You Already Know Which Call
You Are Avoiding.
It came to mind before you finished the headline. That one is costing you more than the twenty you did make this week.
After enough pipeline reviews you stop needing to ask.
You can see it in the record. Twelve opportunities, eleven with notes from this week, and one that has not been touched since a conversation three weeks ago. Nobody has closed it out. Nobody has moved it forward. It just sits there being carried from meeting to meeting.
Ask about it and the answer is always some version of the same thing. Waiting to hear back. Going to follow up this week. Wanted to have something to tell them first.
That is not a pipeline problem. That is a call somebody is avoiding, and every good salesperson I have ever managed has had one.
So did I, for years, and occasionally still do.
What it usually is
The avoided call is almost never a cold one. Cold calls are easy by comparison, because a stranger declining you costs nothing.
It is the client whose renewal you suspect is in trouble. The deal you promised would close last quarter and have not updated since. The customer you let down and have not properly addressed. The prospect who went quiet and you have decided, without evidence, is a no.
What they have in common is that the conversation involves something uncomfortable arriving in your direction. Bad news, a complaint, a rejection you have been able to postpone by not asking.
While you have not made the call, you do not have to know. That is the actual payoff, and it is why the behaviour is so persistent.
While you have not
made the call,
you do not
have to know.
The cost is not the deal
Here is what makes this worth an article rather than a reminder.
The avoided call does not sit quietly in one corner of your week. It follows you. You think about it in the car. It surfaces at eleven at night. It is there in the back of your mind during other calls, taking up capacity that was supposed to be going somewhere useful.
One unmade call can occupy more mental space than a full day of activity, and it produces nothing while it does so.
Then there is the compounding. Every day you do not call, the call gets harder. On day three you are following up. On day thirty you are explaining why you disappeared for a month, which is a conversation with an entirely different emotional starting point.
And your silence is not neutral to them either. They are drawing conclusions from it, and none of the conclusions are good. Most people read silence as a message, usually that they were not important enough.
Why intention does not fix it
The thing about the avoided call is that you already intend to make it. That is what makes it different from ordinary laziness.
You have intended to make it for a fortnight. You have moved it forward in your task list several times. The intention is not in short supply and adding more of it does not help, which is why telling yourself to be more disciplined has never once worked on this specific problem.
There is a well-studied fix, and it is almost annoyingly simple.
Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran examined what happens when people move from a goal intention, I intend to do X, to an implementation intention, which specifies the when, where and how in advance: if it is Tuesday at nine, then I will call Sarah.
Across 94 independent tests involving more than 8,000 people, forming an if-then plan produced a medium-to-large improvement in goal attainment, with an effect size of d = 0.65.
The effect was even stronger, around d = 0.77, for preventing people from derailing partway through something they had started.
The mechanism is that the plan hands control to a cue in the environment rather than to your willingness in the moment. When Tuesday nine o’clock arrives, the decision has already been made somewhere calmer.
That is the whole intervention. Not more resolve. A specific time, attached to a specific trigger, decided while you are not dreading it.
Because the version you are currently running, I need to call them this week, has no cue in it at all. It relies on you choosing to do the unpleasant thing at some unspecified moment, which is exactly the choice you have already declined fourteen times.
The call is almost always smaller than the dread
Every salesperson knows this and almost nobody acts on it.
The conversation you have been carrying for three weeks generally takes six minutes. Sometimes the client is not annoyed at all. Sometimes they had forgotten. Sometimes they tell you something that reframes the whole opportunity and you realise you have been avoiding a conversation that was going to help you.
And on the occasions when it goes badly, it is over. You know. You can act on real information rather than managing a feeling about incomplete information, and the twenty percent of your attention that deal was consuming comes back.
A clean no is more valuable than a maybe you are afraid to test.
Make the call you thought of at the headline
- Write the if-then now, not the intention. Not I will call them this week. If it is nine fifteen tomorrow, then I dial this number. The research says the specificity is doing the work, not the commitment.
- Make it first, not when you feel ready. You will not feel ready, and everything you do beforehand becomes a reason to postpone. Put it before the easy calls rather than after them.
- Open by naming the gap. I owe you an update and I have been slower than I should have been. Almost everyone responds better to that than to a manufactured reason for calling, and it removes the thing you were actually dreading.
- Count the ones you are carrying. Go through your pipeline and mark every opportunity you have not contacted in two weeks. That number is your real avoidance rate, and it is usually higher than anyone expects.
What I tell my own teams
When somebody is in a rough patch, I do not start with technique. I ask which call they have been putting off.
There is nearly always one, and it is nearly always connected. The avoidance is not a symptom of the slump so much as a small ongoing tax on everything else, and clearing it tends to unlock more than the deal itself was worth.
You thought of yours before you got past the title of this piece. It has probably been there for a while.
Pick the time. Write it down. Then make it before you have talked yourself out of it again.
The avoided call is never the cold one, it is the conversation where something uncomfortable might arrive, and not making it means not having to know. It compounds daily and occupies more attention than a full day of activity. Intention will not fix it because you already intend to make it. Across 94 studies and 8,000 people, specifying the when and where in advance produced a medium-to-large improvement in follow-through. Pick the exact time now, while you are calm.
Keynotes and
workshops.
Chris speaks at sales kickoffs and to revenue teams on consistency, mindset, and handling objections, drawn from building and leading sales organizations rather than studying them.
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From Doubt to Done
Twelve reframes for the moments when the voice in your head starts making your decisions for you. Free and printable, no email required.
