Yes, I know, it’s hard to get started after a holiday so here are some of the reasons why you might take a while to get going on your calls and some ideas how to get over them.

1.  You avoid doing the calls because you  find a lot of things to do like the filing from last year, the email inbox to sort out, the paperwork to prepare for 2012, meetings to attend., the diary to plan

2.  You fear you won’t be well received because people are only just back at work.

3.  You believe the prospects on your list will never buy from you so what is the point in calling them?

4. You think the calls can wait till next week.

5. You have no goals/motivation so you have nothing to aim for yet

6. You don’t feel good about yourself and have a negative self image at the moment

7.  You need to learn more about your new products you are selling before you feel confident to talk about them. Product knowledge is vital.

All of these avoidance behaviours are not going to serve you if you want to have your best year ever. Think about it this way, one hour of procrastination per day equals 225 selling hours wasted a year (based on working 45 weeks a year). There is a way to get round all of them.

Write down the behaviours you personally act out to avoid the calling? Being aware of those is the first step.

7 Ideas To Kickstart Your Telephone Sales (more…)

I  would like to take this opportunity to wish you a very happy Christmas and New Year. Relax, enjoy, so you are ready with renewed energy to help others to invest in your services next year. Remember, people will buy your energy, much more than what you say so you need to re-energise and take a proper break.

A good colleague of mine, David Penglase invited me to do a webinar with him recently. He managed to extract some great tips out of me so he has invited me to share this webinar recording with my subscribers.

You can listen to it at your leisure on this link.

http://salescoachcentral.com/webinars_november_2011_public.html

You might want to look at the coaching programme on Sales Coach Central’s website over the break.  For your own regular training and motivation, there are some awesome materials in there and if you would like to join for less than $1 a day,  I can offer you a 20% discount.  Just let me know and I will organise a special link for you to get the discount for this coaching programme. Check it out first at

http://salescoachcentral.com/index_freetour.

I will be working in January and am taking the last week of January off to ski in Heavenly Valley, USA.  I have speaking engagements in Iran and Malawi before the end of March so looks like there will be some nice travel for me next year. (It was always my intention to work globally at this stage of my career).

What do you want to have happen next year?  Write it down and if your intention has clarity and focus, it will happen, I promise. It is the same technique you use for cold calling success. Be clear what you want from the call, focus and your call will be much more successful.

I am constantly on the look-out for little things that can get you a better response from your customer when selling and was reminded of a couple of things at my in-house trainings recently.

1. Change “Why” questions to “How” questions whenever you can

Sometimes “why” makes prospects feel defensive and it can sound interrogating or demanding when you don’t have the right tone in your voice. You can also increase the amount of information you get from your customer if you begin your questions with “how”. “How” sounds less challenging too.

For example:

Salesperson: “Why did you buy from Pilkingtons?”

Could be changed to:

Salesperson: “How did you make a decision to purchase from Pilkingtons?”

Salesperson: “Why aren’t you interested?”

Could be changed to:

Salesperson: “How specifically could we make this of more interest to you?”

2. Avoid using the word “BUT” to counter an objection (more…)

If you were asked to analyse the questions you ask of people before starting to talk about what you have to offer (which is what I hope you do), could you say that you have a good balance between questions that evoke logical answers and questions that evoke emotional answers? What percentage of your questions are logical compared to emotional?  I hope there is a good balance because people buy on emotion and justify with logic. If you never ask emotional questions, then your sales results might not be as good as they have the potential to be.

When you ask logic questions, the emphasis is focusing on talking about price, getting the appointment, the types of programmes and services you have, the technical information. When you ask questions that evoke the emotion, you are getting out of the customer why they would want what you have. You talk about the effects and outcomes of using your service, the peace of mind, the relief, ease, fun and excitement.

Here are some ideas of questions you could ask that evoke the emotion (more…)

Are Your Written Sales Skills Losing You Sales?

Nowadays telephone sales is far more than selling on the phone. It is also about how you write the written copy that follows up your call and appointment.

We are all so busy, we think we can write in short, curt sentences on emails as if we were sending a text message. Oh no, not so, We must still be in sales mode when we are following up with an email.

I have picked up on a common issue with more than one or two of my coaching clients at the moment and it is this ….They are fine on the phone about interesting the prospect in what they have and then they get asked to email everything they are proposing in writing before the client will decide.

Do you know that what you send them could kill any interest you have just generated? (more…)

How To Double Your Sales In One Week

You have probably realised that telesales is a combination of a numbers game and a skills game. The more calls you make, the more sales and appointments you make. So this month, let’s look at how you could increase your activity, i.e. the number of calls you make so you get more success.

I am coaching someone this week who told me he makes 25 calls a day. My immediate train of thought went to wondering what on earth he was doing with his time if he could only make 25 calls a day. Now this guy was not selling anything but an appointment to meet with his director. He should be able to make 10 calls an hour minimum and if he called for 5 hours a day, that would be 50 calls per day. On average he was getting 1 call in 10 to agree to an appointment . That would mean he would get 5 appointments a day instead of 2. Here is where I found the time was being lost. (more…)

We always learn better when we have a bit of fun so I have put the principles of a good telesales/telemarketing call into a song. Please listen to it, tick if you like it and share it with someone else if you can.The more people practice these principles when they call, the less rejection they will get. Go to

Telemarketing Song Or simply search on Telemarketing Song at www.youtube.com

Here are the steps of a successful telesales call once you reach your decision maker.

1. Build rapport by mentioning something you know or have seen about the person or the person’s company.

2. Create an interest grabbing statement – one sentence with one major benefit to the customer.

3. Ask no more than 3 open-ended or direct questions

4. Demonstrate listening skills by repeating back what they said

5. Present your offer with a) benefits,b) a testimonial proving it is good c) create $ value in your proposal, d) create urgency to buy

6. Do a Trial Close before a real close

7. Handle the objections

8. Close

I am often asked to do assessments of telephone sales teams and contact centre telemarketing teams to see where they can improve. The same mistakes often occur everywhere I go so it is easy for me to see why the staff are not making sales.

Last week, I visited one of the worst performing call centres I have ever seen. The telemarketers had received some product training but no sales training. They were getting one appointment per day per telemarketer and making 300 calls each. I believe they should be getting one appointment per hour. I have listed the things they did wrong so you can check you do not do any of these things yourself. (more…)

You might be the greatest salesperson on the phone in your organisation but when your new prospect calls you back to order, the person answering the phone on the frontline of your organisation has not been trained in telephone sales skills and his/her manner loses you the order. First impressions of your company are made by a person’s phone answering manner in the first 15 seconds.

I called a company the other day in response to a big expensive advert in the newspaper. I wanted the special offer they were advertising but the person answering the phone told me she had heard nothing about a special offer and it would be prices as normal. I could not really believe what I heard. This company was spending huge dollars on advertising but the marketing department had not yet had time to alert the people answering the phone about the offer and how to sell it. What a waste! (more…)