Ep 12 - John McMahon
"I Pick Up the Phone Because No One Else Does": John McMahon on Connection as Your Edge
Key takeaways
John McMahon, a Chicago EOS Implementer with twelve years and over a thousand sessions, says the phone call has quietly become his best business-development tool.
The tools built to connect us, email, text, Slack, have made us more reachable but less connected, and the gap keeps growing.
John picks up the phone precisely because almost no one else does anymore, which is exactly what makes a real call stand out.
You don't win clients with email blasts or scraped contact lists, you win them through real conversations, now rare enough to be memorable.
The move to steal: skip the cold call, have someone email to set a time first, then use a scheduled half hour by voice for the human, wandering part no message thread ever reaches.
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The Idea
The phone became a differentiator.
Ask John where connection has gone, and he points straight at the tools that were meant to create it. The phone, the email, the text, the Slack message. His view is that they have made us more reachable and less connected at once, and that the effect keeps accelerating.
He goes back to the late 1980s to make the point. His first job out of school was at an industrial supply company in Illinois that ran almost entirely on the phone, dozens of people at a sales desk taking orders all day. Then a storm knocked out the primary phone switch and shut the sales desk down completely. Back then, "when the phone stopped ringing, the world was going to end."
Now the opposite is true. "Today, your phone doesn't ring for a week and it doesn't even bother us." The default has flipped to text and email, and that flip is exactly where he sees the opening.
"I pick up the phone all the time and call people. And the reason is because no one else does."
A tool almost everyone has abandoned becomes a way to stand out, precisely because they have abandoned it. Chris Beer made the same point from the other side of a receiver, describing a call with a fellow Implementer that wandered into shared opportunities a thread of texts would never have reached.
For a field where most Implementers say they want more clients in the year ahead, this is bigger than it looks.
You do not win those clients by blasting out email campaigns or scraping contact lists for names to mail a book to. You win them through real conversations, which have become rare enough to be worth remembering. John does not treat that as something to mourn. He treats the fragmentation as something to push back on, one real conversation at a time.
The Steal
Schedule the call, then actually call
Pick one relationship you would normally maintain by text or email, a client mid-quarter, a prospect who went quiet, and move it to a real conversation. One catch from John: do not cold-call out of the blue. Most people do not welcome a random call from left field. Have someone email first to set a time, so they can prepare and show up ready. Then use the call for the wandering, human part no message thread ever reaches. A scheduled half-hour by voice will do more than a month of texts.
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