Imagine you are a salesperson.

Your job is to sell a product or service and you are responsible for finding your own customers.

One of the recommended ways of doing so is to make cold calls.

You hate making cold calls. They are stomach churning, gut grinding, tedious, rejection filled and distasteful.

And like many in your profession, for all the above-mentioned reasons, you do everything you can to avoid them.

Then one day your boss approaches you with a proposition: every time you make a cold call and reach someone, he will dig into his pocket and give you $139.60. No questions asked.

By simply dialing the phone 10 times each day you would go home with $1,396.00 in your pocket.

Every day.

Would that incentive help you in overcoming your resistance to making these calls?

One year ago, I introduced a client of mine – a realtor – to The Habit of Doing One More.

We all know there is an inextricable link between effort and reward and my recommendation to my client was this: at the end of each day, before packing up and going home, with coat on and keys in hand, as your last function of the day, pick up the phone and make one more call.

That’s it – on top of everything else you have done that day, make just one more call.

And she did. And she tracked the results from the first one more call on January 4, 2016 to the final one on Monday afternoon as she was walking out of the office and preparing to leave on a three-week vacation.

She made a total of 227 one more calls.

And the results astounded her.

These calls resulted in her having follow-up calls and/or meetings with 14 people she may never have met had she not made those calls.

Those 14 introductions resulted in closing three additional deals earning her an added $31,680 in commissions.

Which translates into a value of $139.60 for each of those extra calls she made.

And she is pumped. So much so that not only will she continue The Habit of Doing One More in 2017, but she has decided to change it a little so that it becomes the Habit of Doing Two More.

In sharing her story with me, she told me she would never have believed that by extending each workday by less than five minutes, she could add more than $30,000 to her annual income or, as she put it, “give myself more than a 25% raise.”

The Habit of Doing One More it is not for the exclusive use of salespeople. It is there for all to use and all it takes is desire, determination and effort.

It requires being serious about reaching your goals.

It means wanting something so badly that you will always go the extra mile to get it. And, as my friend pointed out with an impish smile, the greatest lesson of all, regardless of how many times you hear the word no, for each 14 yes’s you hear, you get to go home with an extra $31,680.

And that makes the pain of all those no’s eminently bearable.

Let’s make a habit of meeting like this.