Welcome to The Fordyce Letter:
Dear Barb:
Thank you for accepting my invitation to connect on LinkedIn. Perhaps you’d be open to offering some suggestions as to the most effective ways to get decision makers (Director, VP and C-Suite executives) on the phone. Once I speak with them in real time, I have no problems conducting sales presentations and closing them on using my recruiting services. After being in outside (medical device) sales for many years, I still struggle with getting past their administrative assistants, which is curious, since I never had any problems, previously.
Can you please help? Thank you for your time and kind attention.
Robin S. Newhall, CA
How phone research and Internet sourcing work together
Let’s face it, no matter how many times you may pick up your phone on a daily basis, there are always more skills that can be learned when it comes to cold calling. Phone skills are a staple part of every recruiter’s toolkit — without the skills to cold call, phone source, interview, sell, and close, you won’t make it as a recruiter.
Overall hiring is increasing! Recruiters I’ve recently spoken with, including many at the ERE Expo in San Diego recently, are all off to a great 2011. 
Last week I went to pay some bills online. I looked at my account and realized there were charges listed that I had never made. I called the bank immediately. We shut down all of my accounts and opened new ones.
Thirty six years ago, I was an accountant. Happily or unhappily, as the case may be, putting lots of numbers into lots of big black books. Yes, they were big black books. Edison had invented the light bulb but Microsoft was some kind of fabric that kept small children and big dogs from making a mess on pillows . Being not too long out of a divorce I was focused on talking on the phone to discover what was going on with the rest of the world of newly divorced people — planning where and what time the “young and the restless” were going to solve the problems of the world that night. In a fit of pique, my boss walked by my office and uttered the now infamous words, “Why don’t you go find a job where you can do what you do best…talk on the phone.”
In a recent blog post by Jessica Lee, Senior Employment Manager at APCO Worldwide, a privately held, global public affairs and strategic strategic communications firm, she 
