5-Minute Selling

CHAPTER 7COMPARING YOUR PROACTIVE COMMUNICATIONS PATHWAYS

The telephone is the best communications pathway for growing sales quickly because you can make lots of calls to many customers and prospects quickly—far more than in-person visits.

In sales growth, email is only a tiny bit better than doing nothing at all. Here are the communications types, from least effective to most effective:

Let's discuss these communications briefly, in order.

IN-PERSON MEETINGS

Of course, these are best, but they also require the most time.

Nothing can replace seeing the person, and his body language, in his environment. Meetings also have the gigantic added benefit of being able to see your customer's warehouse, if you are in this kind of work. Here you can observe what else he buys from others, and offer to help with that. This is a kind of reverse DYK (although you find the products simply by seeing them rather than actually asking the question) and a pivot to the sale.

Face-to-face conversations are the Mount Olympus of sales efforts. Nothing is better. However, they do also require the most time, right?

There are only so many hours in a day, and you can only have so many meetings. If you lay out your visits really well, you can maybe do one visit an hour. That's six or seven a day, in a very busy day. Most salespeople cannot sustain this kind of grind.

But most of us can make six or ...