5-Minute Selling

The Proven, Simple System That Can Double Your Sales ... Even When You Don't Have Time

Alex Goldfayn

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119687689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Sales
• Index: Business

WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER

Add 50% to 100% to Your SalesIn 5 Minutes Per Day

5-Minute Selling presents a proven, simple process that can double your sales, even if you dont have time for an elaborate new sales system. When you spend your days scrambling to take orders and resolving customer issues, there is little time for new sales techniques. This book is for you. In 5-Minute Selling, Alex Goldfayn describes how thousands of his clients and workshop attendees have generated dramatic annual sales growth with short bursts of action throughout the day. With three-second efforts throughout the day, you can add 50 to 100% to your sales.

The techniques in this book are simple but powerful:

• Youll learn the power of picking up the phone proactively to call customers and prospects when nothing is wrong, because almost nobody does this
• Youll get approaches for offering customers additional products and servicesand asking about what else they are buying elsewherebecause almost nobody does this either
• Youll also learn about the low-tech but incredibly effective singular impact of the hand-written note

In short, 5-Minute Selling is about showing customers and prospects that we care about them more than our competition does with simple, repeated, lightning-fast, high-value, consistent communications.

Dont Read This Book, DO THIS BOOK:

5-Minute Selling lays out a Two-Week Challenge for you implement in your sales work. Follow the detailed process for five minutes per day, for 10 working days (less than one total hour of time), and, like thousands before you, you will begin to see dramatic improvements in your sales growth.

PART ONE
INTRODUCING THE 5-MINUTE SELLING SYSTEM

CHAPTER 1
WHAT IS THE 5-MINUTE SELLING SYSTEM?

The 5-Minute Selling System consists of two planners to help you lay out your proactive calls and follow-ups for the coming week, and two trackers where you can record your progress and success.

The 5-Minute Selling System consists of implementing any of the 16 proactive communications actions listed in this chapter and Part 4 of this book for a combined total of five minutes per day and writing down the results on the Action Tracker in this chapter.

We will use two planning tools and two tracking tools. I will introduce them in this chapter and then revisit them throughout the book where it makes sense.

The approach is to communicate with customers and prospects proactively for a combined 5 minutes per day, or 25 total minutes weekly.

You'll need to spend five to 10 additional minutes intentionally planning your week on Sunday or Monday morning. And you may need another 10 minutes weekly to write down your actions and results to track your success and additional opportunities for following up.

So if you stick to these timelines, we're looking at 55 minutes in a week. Less than an hour to do work that will dramatically increase your sales. It might shoot your sales up 50% or 100%. Is it worth less than one hour out of a 40-hour week to focus on increasing your sales that much?

Can you do more than five minutes a day? Of course. You're welcome to.

The more you communicate with customers and prospects, the more they buy. And the less you communicate, the less they buy.

More on these five daily minutes at the end of this chapter.

THE PROACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS

Here are the 16 actions that make up the 5-Minute Selling System:

As you can see, the entire left side consists of proactive phone calls, which are a big focus for this work. There are eight different kinds of people you can call: five are customers, and three are prospects.

These calls will often result in a voicemail, and I will teach you how to leave a really effective one (see Chapter 15).

On the right side are 10 proactive communications that do not require you to dial out. They can be made on your existing calls, with customers who call in throughout the day. You certainly can call customers to make these communications, but you don't need to. Many of these communications—including the fast-acting did you know question (DYK—Chapter 25) and reverse did you know question (rDYK—Chapter 26) are single questions, requiring 3 seconds to ask and another 10 seconds to write down.

There is a brief chapter on each of the 16 actions on this list in Part 4 of this book.

QUICKLY PLANNING YOUR UPCOMING WEEK OF PROACTIVE OUTREACH

Because making proactive communications is not the default position for most of us salespeople, we need to be intentional about this work so that it can become a habit.

We need to write down who we will reach out to and follow up with. This helps us think about people we wouldn't usually talk to during the week and, more importantly, keeps them in front of our eyes during the week so that we remember to call them. To this end, I am arming you with two quick planners.

Here is the Proactive Call Planner:

This is where to quickly think through who you will call this week. Three minutes of writing here is enough to load you up with five business days' worth of calls. Not 30 minutes, but 3 minutes.

Another quick tool for you to spend a few minutes with at the beginning of your week is the Weekly Follow-Up Planner:

This is a place to write down the three most important, lowest-hanging kinds of opportunities to follow up on in the coming week.

I recommend that you use these two planners for no more than three minutes each at the beginning of the week. Write down as many names as you can in the three minutes. More guidance on how to use each planner is in Chapter 11. This chapter is a quick overview. Later, we'll dive deeper.

QUICKLY TRACKING

Planning lets us organize our thoughts and quickly prepare ourselves for proactive actions during the week. Then, throughout the week, mostly in quick bursts that take seconds, not minutes, we do the work.

As the work gets done, I'd like you to quickly write it down. If you don't want to write, you can type.

It doesn't matter how you plan and track—it only matters that you quickly plan and quickly track. This way, you can track your successes.

You know what's working. And most importantly, you know what to follow up on.

First, consider u...