Pick Up The Phone and Sell

How Proactive Calls to Customers and Prospects Can Double Your Sales

Alex Goldfayn

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781119814603
• eBook ISBN: 9781119814658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Unlock the power of a simple phone call to boost your sales with guidance from a world-renowned expert 

In Pick Up The Phone and Sell: How Proactive Calls To Customers and Prospects Can Double Your Sales, sales expert, consultant, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Alex Goldfayn delivers a comprehensive roadmap to one of the most important weapons in any salesperson's arsenal: the phone.

From the author of Selling Boldly and 5-Minute Selling, the book teaches you techniques to supercharge your sales by making the proactive call the tip of your selling spear. In addition to critical advice on how to call people you don't know, this timely and important book includes:

• A thorough introduction to the power of a proactive phone call and links to free call planners and trackers at goldfayn.com
• Direction on how to use text messaging as an adjunct to phone sales
• Instructions on the appropriate role of social media, including LinkedIn, in boosting telephone sales
• Guidance on how to stop being afraid of phone calls and how to effectively warm up any cold call.

Perfect for new and experienced salespeople alike, who are more comfortable with email, videoconferencing, social media, and text than they are with the telephone, Pick Up The Phone and Sell is an indispensable guide to one of the most important and lucrative tools in the selling profession.

PART ONE
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1
THE LOST ART OF PROACTIVE CALLING IN THE SALES PROFESSION

This is the most obvious book I've ever written.

You're reading my fifth book on sales growth, but none has been as clearly necessary and important to write as this one. Especially now, in a post-pandemic world, where we cannot see our customers nearly as much as we previously could.

In the selling profession, only the phone is so universally understood to be the key to success and, at the same time, so widely avoided. A surprisingly large number of salespeople even dread it.

In the 1980s and so many of the decades that came before, if you wanted to sit in your office and communicate with a lot of people quickly, the only option you had was the wired landline telephone.

So a lot of salespeople had no choice but to be really good at using the phone.

In the late 1990s, we got email. It was faster. And easier.

And, over time, many of us moved to email as our preferred method of communicating with customers and prospects.

Then we got cell phones.

And text messages.

And then social media rolled in:

We could have Facebook pages.

And LinkedIn connections.

And we could tweet at people.

All of these things were also faster, easier, and far less threatening than the phone.

So we went to them.

Because on these platforms, rejection is usually simply silence, whereas on the phone, it's intimate and personal and spoken directly into our ears.

Of course, we still have meetings, and we're good at them because we never really stopped having them.

But how many meetings can you have in a day? About as many as an hour's worth of phone conversations.

And so, over the last few “Internet decades,” the entire sales profession has moved away from what so many used to excel at: proactive phone calls to customers and prospects.

What's a proactive call?

Communicating by phone with customers and prospects when nothing is wrong.

I run a large solo consulting practice, working with business-to-business organizations to grow their sales. My clients average 10–20% in additional new sales growth annually directly from our work together. Even large companies, in mature industries. Even companies that have been stagnant and have not added significantly to their sales in years. Even these companies add 10–20% in new sales.

Individually, many salespeople double and sometimes even triple their sales when applying the techniques I teach them – techniques I lay out in this book.

How would doubling your sales numbers improve your life?

Or maybe “only” increasing them by 50% … what would that do for you and your family?

How do my client salespeople achieve this kind of growth?

Centrally, with the phone.

By letting customers and prospects hear from them proactively.

By being present.

By being interested.

By demonstrating that they care.

How?

Almost entirely with the phone.

Before the pandemic, I did 75 to 100 speeches and workshops each year focused on my techniques for sales growth.

When the pandemic besieged us, I continued doing live sessions virtually, but because salespeople couldn't see their customers any more, I doubled down on how to use the phone to grow sales.

Many of these sessions were in multiple parts – often a series of three sessions, with the same audience each time.

By the third webinar, after spending at least two hours exploring the ins and outs of telephone selling, I would ask the attendees what they'd like me to focus on. I like to go where my audiences want me to go.

I would even give options:

• Do you want to talk about selling more to existing customers?
• Or asking for referrals?
• Or following up on quotes or proposals?
• What about asking for the business?
• Or do you want me to go over phone selling some more? (Keep in mind, this was the dominant topic of the previous two sessions these same people had attended.)

Via the chat function, people made their requests. The vast majority of topics salespeople wanted to cover centered on selling over the phone:

• When should we call?
• Who should we call?
• What if we don't have the customer's cell phone number?
• Do I leave a voice message?
• How many times should I try before giving up?

And then, inevitably, these kinds of comments would be raised:

• I don't like selling on the phone, but ...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• DEDICATION
• PART ONE: INTRODUCTION
• PART TWO: YOUR MINDSET AND YOUR PHONE
• PART THREE: CALL TACTICS, MECHANICS, AND STRATEGIES
• PART FOUR: WHO SHOULD YOU CALL? MOSTLY, CALL PEOPLE YOU KNOW
• PART FIVE: COLD CALLS: CALLING PEOPLE YOU DON'T KNOW … YET
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INDEX
• END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT