Every week, a handful of young producers at one of my agencies dial into a Microsoft Teams meeting called, simply, “Calls.” They join. They mute themselves. And then, for the next hour, not one of them says a single word to anybody else on that call.
If you’re picturing an accountability check-in, a training session, or some kind of sales pep rally, you’re picturing the wrong thing. So did I, the first time Dawson Eastes described it to me. Dawson’s a producer at RT Insurance, less than a year into his career, and he told me this almost as an afterthought while we were talking about something else entirely.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since, because I think he stumbled onto the real fix for cold call reluctance, and it isn’t the fix most agency owners are paying for.
What Most Agencies Try First
Here’s what most of us do when a producer freezes up before a stack of dials. We buy a better script. We run a confidence workshop. We put a leaderboard on the wall so everybody can see who’s dialing and who isn’t. We assign a manager to check in and ask how many calls got made today. All of that assumes cold call reluctance is a knowledge problem, a confidence problem, or a supervision problem, and so we treat it with more teaching, more motivation, or more watching. That isn’t wrong, but it isn’t always what is actually going on.
Dawson’s Teams call does none of those three things. Nobody on that muted call is teaching anybody anything. Nobody’s watching anybody’s dial count. Nobody’s cheering anybody on. And it works better than most of what agencies spend real money on. That should bother you a little, in a productive way, because it means the actual lever sitting underneath cold call reluctance isn’t the one we’ve been pulling.
The Room Itself Is the Mechanism
Strip away the teaching, strip away the watching, strip away the cheerleading, and what’s left on that Teams call is something older and much simpler: another human being, present, doing the exact same hard thing you’re doing, at the exact same time you’re doing it. That’s the whole mechanism. Psychologists have a name for it, and they’ve known about it since long before anybody built a CRM.
Cyclists Figured This Out First
Back in 1898, a researcher named Norman Triplett noticed something odd watching bicycle races. Riders went faster when another cyclist was simply on the track alongside them, even when the two of them weren’t racing each other and nobody was keeping score. He took the question into a lab after that and had kids reel in fishing line, first alone and then side by side with a stranger doing the identical task. Same result, every time. A hundred and some years later, psychologists still call it social facilitation, and it holds up: the mere presence of another person doing your task next to you changes your effort, even in total silence, even with zero interaction between you.
Presence Beats a Leaderboard
Notice what that finding does not require. It doesn’t require competition. It doesn’t require anybody to know the score. The moment you turn a room like Dawson’s into a leaderboard, ranking one producer’s dials against another’s, posting numbers where everybody can see them, you’ve swapped in a completely different ingredient. Now you’re asking people to win, and for the producer running behind, that pressure produces the exact avoidance you were trying to cure in the first place. This is the same trap a lot of agency owners fall into with accountability generally. Real accountability means the burden stays on the producer, not on you as the leader watching over their shoulder. A leaderboard quietly does the opposite. It moves the burden of feeling watched right back onto the producer, and watched is not the same thing as accompanied.
Plain presence asks for none of that. It only asks a producer to show up at the same time as somebody else doing the same unpleasant work. No score. No comparison. No talking required. Picture two people on treadmills at the gym, side by side, neither one racing the other, neither one saying a word. Both of them, almost without deciding to, push harder and stay on longer than they would running alone at home. Nobody coached them. Nobody timed them. The other runner’s presence did the work. Cold call reluctance operates on the same nervous system as that treadmill: the felt experience of being the only person in the world about to do something uncomfortable. That feeling evaporates the moment you’re not actually alone in the room, even a muted, virtual one.
The Habit That Stuck
Dawson told me it started small. He was having what he calls “head trash” days, the mornings the cold call reluctance shows up loudest, right before a prospecting block. Instead of white-knuckling through it solo, or waiting for it to pass, he opened a Teams meeting, named it “Calls,” and sent it to the other young producers in his program at Superior. “I’m struggling with some head trash today,” he told them. “Would love to make some calls with all of you.” They joined. They muted. They dialed, each one working their own list, and nobody talked.
Here’s the detail that convinced me this wasn’t an accident. It turned into a standing habit, the same handful of people, showing up to sit quietly with the discomfort together, week after week. Dawson still has cold call reluctance some mornings. He told me so directly. What changed is that the reluctance no longer gets to be the only voice in the room. There’s a treadmill running next to his.
That’s a different mechanism than the one that gets him through a first meeting once he’s actually landed it. The wedge process, the memorized proactive services, all of that is what makes him effective once he’s face to face with a prospect. The muted Teams call is what gets him to pick up the phone in the first place. Prospecting is still the number one source of new production in this business, and none of the rest of the system matters if a producer never dials.
Build the Room
If you run an agency, you already own every tool required to build this. It costs you nothing. Here’s how to set it up correctly, because the details matter more than they look like they should.
Block a standing time, twice a week minimum, same days, same hour, whole producer team invited. Camera on or a muted call, either works, but pick one and keep it consistent so it becomes a habit rather than an event. One rule matters above the rest: everybody works their own list for the full hour, and nobody talks. Resist the urge to turn it into a training session or a coaching huddle. The second you add teaching, coaching, or commentary, you’ve replaced the mechanism that makes this work with a different one entirely, and you’ll lose the effect. This is plain prospecting time, held together, in the same silence, with nothing else attached to it.
Don’t turn it into a leaderboard either, no matter how tempting a public dial count feels. If you want to hold producers accountable for consistency, do it separately, in a system where the producer owns the number rather than performs for an audience. The room and the accountability system are two different tools solving two different problems. Mixing them breaks both.
Watch what happens to your dial counts over the following month. You’ll see them climb without a single incentive attached to any of it, because the room changed, and the room does more of the work than a pep talk or a script rewrite ever will.
Dawson has written about $70,000 in new business revenue since he started running the Wedge process for real, and he’ll tell you the training mattered and the role play mattered. But ask him what actually gets him through a Tuesday morning full of dials he dreads making, and he’ll point you to a muted Teams call full of people he never talks to while he’s on it. Cold call reluctance gets quieted by company, even silent company, even company you can’t see, more reliably than it ever gets talked out of anybody with a better argument for why the fear is irrational.
If cold call reluctance is quietly capping what your producers bring in, the fix is building the room, then building the rest of the system around producers who are actually making their dials. That’s exactly what we walk agency owners through. Book a call and let’s build it.
