Pick Up The Phone and Sell. Alex Goldfayn

fact, you can count on one hand the phone-selling books that have been written in the last decade.

And not one of them looks at selling with the phone in combination with the digital tools at our disposal: virtual meeting tools like Zoom, text messaging, email, and, yes, social media like LinkedIn.

      Want to look for a blog or podcast about phone selling? When I Google “phone selling,” I get “selling old cell phones for cash.”

      So, I wrote Pick Up the Phone and Sell.

      My goal is to arm you with a quick and simple guide for attaining significant sales growth by proactively calling your customers and prospects.

      Get good at using the phone, and you will be in rare air in the sales profession.

      Because the great majority of salespeople are not very good at using the phone.

      I'd say 90% of salespeople are reactive in our work.

      We're very good at answering the phone and solving problems.

      But not many of us regularly pick up the phone to call customers and prospects proactively when nothing is wrong.

      This is where relationships are built.

      This is where trust is formed.

      This is where you get to help your customers and expand your business with them.

      This is where the money is made.

      The rare salesperson who regularly and systematically makes proactive calls gets to stack these successes one on top of the other, with customer after customer.

      Among my clients, the salespeople who most often proactively call customers and prospects are the most successful salespeople in their organizations.

      Ninety percent of salespeople are reactive and don't call.

      Want to launch yourself instantly into the top 10% of all salespeople?

      Follow the approaches you're about to read, and leverage the power of proactive calls.

      There's a book for that now!

      DOWNLOAD YOUR PICK UP THE PHONE AND SELL TOOLS

The tools, forms, planners, and trackers that appear throughout this book are available as a free download at my website, www.Goldfayn.com.

      You can also get various tools there, like my sales growth instructional videos and free weekly email newsletter.

      Go to Goldfayn.com and arm yourself with the resources to pick up the phone and grow your sales.

CHAPTER 2 AN EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: HOW TO PICK UP THE PHONE AND SELL

Here is a lightning-fast executive summary of the approaches laid out in this book:

      In my experience with tens of thousands of salespeople, clients, and workshop attendees applying my sales growth approaches, the single most effective – and avoided – selling action is the phone call.

      I believe that we salespeople should lead with the phone.

      That is, it should be the first action in our selling day and also the first effort in our selling sequence with individual customers.

      At the start of your week, make a quick plan of who to call.

      Call first. The reasons why are in the next chapter.

      Create your Target 60 list of customers and prospects to focus on for the coming month. This planner is presented in Chapter 7.

Next, lay out your Simple Proactive Call Planner for the week, identifying current and past customers you will call, and current and past prospects. This planner is also in Chapter 7.

      Aim to call three to five customers or prospects per day, first thing in the morning.

      Who should you call? First, call people who you know – current and former customers, and current and former prospects. Call people who recognize your name or at least your company name. Too many people assume proactive calls only mean cold calls. In fact, you can grow your sales dramatically by only calling people you know and offering to help them (more).

      We will revisit this in Chapter 23, but for now, these are the people you should be thinking about calling proactively, with the groups in order from right to left – always focusing on the people who know you or at least recognize you or your company.

      If you prefer, send a quick text in advance to set a time to speak.

      When you call, you will frequently need to leave a voice message (scripts are in Chapter 19), which you should absolutely do.

      After leaving the message, send a short text to let the customer know you called, and invite them to get back to you by text or phone, whichever is easier for them. This gives them a choice of how to communicate with you.

      With this voicemail-text message communication combination, you will find that about two-thirds of your customers and prospects will get back to you.

      On the off chance that the customer picks up the phone, great; you will have a nice, positive conversation. (Simple scripts are throughout Parts 4 and 5.)

Log your communication in the Proactive Call Tracker featured in this book or your own action-tracking or CRM system.

      Log the return communications as well, so you remember who you have reached out to and who got back to you.

      Update your pipeline daily, because this approach will create countless opportunities for you, as well as a daily progression of customers and prospects toward a quote, a proposal, or a close; and, of course, you'll be securing a lot of new business.

      It all starts with a proactive call to a customer or prospect when nothing is wrong.

      Make that the tip of your selling spear.

      Make it the first action.

      And then start making plans for a sudden and significant influx of new business, because the floodgates are about to open.

CHAPTER 3 LEAD WITH THE PHONE: MAKE IT THE TIP OF YOUR SELLING SPEAR

      DEFINITION: WHAT IS A PROACTIVE CALL?

The proactive phone call, for our purposes in this book, is defined as calling customers and prospects when nothing is wrong.

      Your call can be scheduled with a text message.

      While many salespeople only talk on the phone when the customer calls them, this generally focuses the conversation on problems you need to resolve. But this book is about calling the customers proactively, which almost always becomes a conversation about opportunities for you to help the customer.

PROACTIVE CALLS FEED THE SALES MACHINE

      Proactive