I just finished a very promising sales call. Roughly:

Me: So send me a design brief and I’ll fire you off a quote.
Contact: Oh, we uh, don’t have one of those yet…
Me: Oh, well, let’s talk online and I’ll help you guys figure out what you want.

My goal in this interaction is to get them excited (possibly with prototypes) to the point where they say, “look, could you just do it? We want it ASAP and you already know what we’re looking for.”

Fingers crossed — here’s to tracking the work I do “for free” as a tax deduction.

On a more basic HOWTO level, when I make a business call I like to write the person’s name, number, and company at the top of a piece of paper, sketch out some answers to their likely questions, then take notes on what they’re saying during the conversation. The sheet goes in my permanent records when I’m done.

I have a pretty good case of telephone anxiety and a ridiculous amount of planning helps. I find having The Beatles’ Abbey Road medley playing quietly helps too.

Re: Making calls — Tony Robbins sez you should just plan to make one call, an easy one, then call that a success for the day. In the worst cases I send a brief spurt of short personal emails and then try to slip the business communication in while I’m on a roll. Once you see that first call go well you’ll be motivated to keep going — the first one is the problem.

I use the same basic idea, combined with some productivity ideas from my homies in the biz and in grad school, to get the coding ball rolling. Another trick there is to not stress about slacking — just acknowledge it and start with the smallest doable next-task to get the ball rolling again (mixing Robbins, GTD, and a little Buddhist meditation).

Generally I try to organize my task list by “closest time to most money”, which is a finnicky metric you have to figure out for yourself.