Alex Goldfayn - Pick Up The Phone and Sell

You're super busy.

The phone rings all day, presenting perpetual problems that must be handled immediately.

Customers who call are often frustrated, flustered, or downright angry.

And all of these reactive joys of being a salesperson come to you courtesy of …

The phone!

So who could blame you if your view of the phone isn't particularly positive?

And who could blame you if your instinct is to avoid using the phone?

The phone is a major source of daily work stress. It brings you anger, negativity, and condescension.

Me: “Use the phone! Make proactive calls!”

You: “No thanks, I'm good.”

A few months ago, I was doing an interview with a client's salesperson.

She told me that although she has to make phone calls as part of her job, she hates the phone – to the point that when she leaves voice messages, she does not give her phone number.

Rather, she asks that people return her call with an email.

Can you believe that?

Her voicemail asks the customer to email her back!

The Good News Is:The wins come quickly in this work. It doesn't take long to have a good, positive, warm, successful conversation. This will give you the energy and enthusiasm to make the next call. And the next. And suddenly, the phone will be actively making you money. It will be predictably growing your sales . You will find your dislike for phone calls lifting like a spent storm cloud.

This is probably the simplest reason of all:

Nobody has ever armed you with a process for making proactive calls.

How do you make them?

When?

How many is enough?

Especially when the customer doesn't call back.

Who should you call?

What do you say?

What about voicemail?

What about cold calls?

What if you don't have cell phone numbers?

What about Zoom? And texting? And email?

The phone-selling books from the 1970s and 1980s don't apply to today, because now the phone is one tool in a much larger digital communication ecosystem. And as discussed in Chapter 1, it's not like there are lot of phone-selling systems and processes at your disposal.

Unless they are working with me , your company probably is not training you how to properly use the phone to grow your sales.

So, the most obvious reason you're not making proactive calls is that you don't have a program for doing so.

And nobody has ever taught you how.

The Good News Is:You have a system now: it's the book you're holding in your hands. The system is to make a few proactive calls a day, every day – and your sales, opportunities, and pipeline will quickly grow.

We will dive deeply into these issues in Part 2, but the mindset blocks that keep us from picking up the phone have one common characteristic:

They are our discomfort, not the customers' .

It is our discomfort with the phone that keeps us from making proactive calls systematically.

It is not the discomfort of your customers and prospects. They want to hear from you .

It may be our projection of our discomfort onto our customers. That is, we believe our customers don't want us to call, for all the reasons we do not like making calls.

Here are just some of the thoughts that keep us from picking up the phone proactively:

I don't want to bother my customer.

If she wants it, she'll call me, like everyone else.

I don't want to waste their time.

I don't want to make the customer angry or upset with me.

If they get upset, I might lose the customer. And I've worked so hard to win them and then keep them.

Does this feel like thinking that's conducive to selling with the phone?

That's because it isn't.

The Good News Is:Ninety percent of salespeople, in my experience, have these thoughts and fears and discomforts. That means as soon as you can overcome these discomforts, you will instantly vault yourself into the top 10% of all salespeople.

That's why I wrote this book:

To arm you with a simple process for making proactive calls to grow your sales.

To show you that it's easy.

To show you that it doesn't take a lot of time.

To show you that your customers will be happy to hear from you, which is the opposite of what you fear.

To show you that they want you to call them.

And when you do it, it will give them what they want and make them happy.

You will be one of the only ones showing up for them this way.

And then they will thank you with their money.

Because they will appreciate that you care so much that you pick up the phone when nothing is wrong, and ask about their family, and ask what they need help with because you'd like to help them – they will hold on tight, and they will never let go.

You will develop one customer-for-life after another.

All of this happens when you make proactive calls, systematically, to customers and prospects.

Ready to pick up the phone and sell?

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