Graham McGregor: Increase sales with the 30/10 formula

A little practice in the right areas can quickly boost your sales results.

The 30/10 formula means you spend 30 minutes every day reading information that will improve your knowledge and skills in an important area for you.

During this 30 minute period you also spend 10 minutes reading aloud the information you are studying.

30 minutes a day is around 180 hours a year or over a solid month of forty hour weeks. And 10 minutes a day of reading aloud is over 3,000 minutes a year or nearly 50 hours of voice training practice.

The 30/10 formula is very specific in how you do your reading aloud:

You take in a breath at the start of a sentence and begin reading aloud your material. You then pause briefly at each punctuation mark and stopped at the end of a sentence and took another breath. You then begin reading the next sentence; pausing briefly again at each punctuation mark. If you need to take another breath during any sentence, you pause briefly and do this.

When I first came across the 30/10 formula I had a big problem.

I used to talk very fast and my customers found it very hard to understand what I was saying. I knew that talking too fast was costing me sales; however I was not sure how I could fix it.

I decided to try the 30/10 formula. I picked out one of my favourite books on selling and began reading it for 30 minutes each morning. I also began reading it aloud for 10 minutes as part of each 30 minute session.

Now reading aloud for 10 minutes was a lot harder than I thought it would be.

The first day I could only do it for about 3 minutes and my voice got croaky. I found that breathing in at the start of sentence and then pausing at each punctuation mark was very tiring. The next day I got to about 5 minutes and stopped. It was completely different from doing my normal talking.

I kept up my 30/10 formula for about two months and some remarkable things happened. I found that I began to really understand and was able to use some of the ideas in my book on selling. And then something really strange occurred.

Within a one week period I had four people who knew me well ask what I was doing differently. They wondered if I had a new haircut or was wearing some new clothes because I somehow appeared different to them.

What was different was that my voice had changed in that two month period.

I now pronounced words clearer and I was speaking slower and with more authority. All from reading aloud for 10 minutes a day. My sales increased noticeably over this same period.

The key with the 30/10 formula is to pick the information that would help you the most right now. If you are very new in your industry you might use it on trade journals which have a lot of helpful product information. If you want more referrals or to improve your sales presentations you would pick relevant books or other information on those topics.

Action Exercise:

Write down the type of material that would have the potential to increase your sales or income if you practiced it right now. Now start by spending at least 10 minutes a day reading this material and spend at least 3-5 minutes of this time reading it aloud. Once you have the habit of doing this for at least 10 minutes a day, you can then start to slowly increase it by a few minutes each day over a period of time.

"Practice isn't the thing you do when you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good." Malcolm Gladwell