Pick Up The Phone and Sell

CHAPTER 1THE 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 ...